Flat Tire with Bad Guys
by Vathara
Summary: Two hardluck stories meet in a bar... Sam, Hannibal King, and a pool cue. An Urban Legends story.
1. Chapter 1

**Flat Tire with Bad Guys**

A/N: You know the drill. Stargate, Marvel, and all things related belong to people who are definitely not me. No matter how much I might want to kidnap a certain snarky brunet. Part of the "Urban Legends" AU, after "Contact"; refers to bits of "Spies Like Us". No infringement intended; only the plot is mine.

---------

_Hannibal_

So there I was, dead lost, somewhere in a rockier part of Colorado whose only virtue was it wasn't anywhere I'd ever lived before. Or - well - you get the picture. Just off the side of a highway, maybe a half-hour after sunset, with a slightly used green Honda Civic whose right front tire was doing a decent rubber pancake imitation.

"Terrific." I gave my ride a jaundiced look. It may be a neat little car, with a trunk large enough for emergencies, but a lot of it's plastic. Still, the jack plates are steel; I grabbed hold and dragged the car off onto the shoulder. Stepped back - careful not to lose my balance going from asphalt to dirt - and glared at the sky. "First you get me mixed up with Strange again. 'The world is in awesome peril,' 'Demons will rise', yadda yadda yadda." I rolled my eyes. "Like I haven't heard _that_ a thousand times before.

"But no matter how bad the world's been treating me, Deacon Frost coming back from the grave Blade an' I put the bastard in and all, I kind of like the planet in one piece, so I go. Demons, bad guys, demon bad guys trying to use some funky gold and glitter amulet and the Siege Perilous - the _real_ Siege Perilous, 'ccording to Strange, that's supposed to pick through your brain and flip you into the world 'your heart belongs to', whatever _that_ means - to turn our world into hell. We stomp on him, Strange nails the amulet... and _I_ get the booby prize of getting flung through the gate damn near into the middle of San Francisco's midtown traffic, on some crazy variant of Earth that's never heard of the Hulk, or Galactus, or even the _Daily Bugle_."

Which was beyond freaky, into downright bizarre. I mean, yeah, I knew there were alternate worlds; Blade and I had even gotten blasted into one once where Manhattan was one big nest of vampires, and the head of 'em all had been-

Nope. Not going there. Over. Kaput.

But - no _Daily Bugle?_ No anti-mutant laws on the books? No ageless Marie LaVeau doing her voodoo hoodoo down in N'Orleans as she slurped up Bloody Marys made with _vin d' vampyre?_

Not that I was crying my eyes out over that last, mind you. Had to rein in an impulse to fly down there and stomp on the grave but good. _This_ Marie LaVeau hadn't given me any grief. Yet.

"So. I hang up my shingle and get set to wait; Strange may be a manipulative bastard, but he's not gonna leave me swinging in a whole 'nother dimension. Only months go by, no sorcerer, an' a lovely lady from the CIA shows up needing help; my kind of help." Given this world _did_ have vampires of the homicidal kind, only they were a hell of a lot rarer than the Dracula variety. Just getting bit didn't turn you. Weird. "We smack-down Navarro, only he gets Stiles first. And I... and she..." I gnashed my teeth, glaring into the dark. "So she goes vamp in a big way overseas, takes out two Iraqis who might be terrorists. Bet she doesn't even think she did anything wrong. And everything in San Fran reminds me of her... But I'm a PI. I deal. It's what I do. And all you can come up with to throw me is a flat tire?" I flipped a finger toward the overcast. "So what else you got?"

Which, of course, is when it started raining.

Figures.

---------

I sloshed into the _Lizard Lounge,_ trenchcoat dripping, long brown hair almost black with rain, and mood snarly enough to match a wolverine growl for growl. Which I was not. Growling, that is. Fun as it might be in the short term to see the roaches scatter out of here - and it _would_ be fun for oh, maybe three seconds before the guilt kicked in - it just wasn't worth it.

Nope. What I needed was a phonebook, a pay phone, and a place to dry out while I waited for the tow.

I sure didn't need _her._

Medium-tall, for a lady. Short blonde cut, blue eyes staring into the foam on her second glass of microbrew, minimal lipstick and nails. The "I'm pretty, but I work for a living" look. Nice. Also nice was the hint of muscle under the black motorcycle jacket; a hint the rough, tough biker-types sidling up to her with nudges and winks just weren't taking. Too bad for them.

Me? I headed for the phone. I'd played white knight enough for a lifetime. Even _my_ lifetime.

Let's see. Tow trucks, tow trucks... yeah. I pulled out a notepad and pencil, noted down numbers from the tattered yellow pages. A bunch of which had been torn out between 'Engineers' and 'Event planners'. Yeah. Biker bar all right. Heck, even if the local streetwalkers had picked up the British trick of printing dirty postcards with their numbers, the guys probably would have plucked those out of here right along with all the 'Escort services' numbers.

Or maybe it wasn't them who'd assaulted the poor phonebook, but the guy pouring drinks behind the bar, so he could get his cut for "arranging" things. Fit the feel of the place.

What was a nice lady like that doing in here?

Reality check, King. You are Not Thinking about her. She's not your problem. Period. Getting your car back into shape so you can take off - that's your problem.

Yeah. Right. Take off where?

Didn't matter. Anywhere but here.

Okay. Dialing, dialing - answering machine. On a tow service? Sheesh. Next number...

A deep voice; deliberately deep, probably to go along with the guy hitching up his belt, the better to display the - ahem - family jewels. "If I said you had a beautiful body, would you hold it against me?"

Cripes. That line was old when _I_ first used it.

"Not interested."

Nice voice, too. Light, like it had a habit of getting distracted while the brain raced ahead of the tongue. Poet? Writer? Reporter? Naah - not cynical enough for that. Brainy type, though. Huh. In a motorcycle jacket?

Then again, people don't usually look at you and think "occult researcher", King. Life has a way of throwing you into things you never would've planned on getting mixed up in.

Well, life and other things.

Focus. Next number.

Which was kind of hard to dial, the more I overheard the snickers coming from the rest of the room. "...Gave me her keys," the bartender was muttering to one of Lame-line's buddies, sporting a matching rough beard and a greasy red bandanna. "Said to call a cab after the fourth beer..."

Setting her up for the local Lotharios? _Not_ something you do to a regular customer. Meaning Blonde was out of her home territory, and likely way out of her depth, jacket or not. And she definitely did not look the type to take dumb risks like that if she was thinking straight.

Meaning she wasn't.

Meaning she was in trouble. And about to be in more trouble.

Damn it, she wasn't my problem!

...Yeah, right. And who else in this bar was going to lift a finger to stop it?

_Crash! _

Well. Looked like _she_ was.

I hung up on an irate mechanic and sauntered back toward the brawl, watching Blonde perform formal introductions: Lame-line, this is Barstool. No, really, Barstool. One more _time,_ just to make it _stick..._ _Barstool._

Oh, and Barstool? This is... darn, he's passed out again.

Which was about when Lame-line's buddies decided on a few meet-and-greets of their own; Mr. Fist, Mr. Blackjack, Mr. Hi-ya Karate, and-

_Click. _

Uh-huh. Mr. Switchblade.

I swirled into the knot for our rudest guest, grinding a few wrist-bones together until shiny metal dropped to the floor, then flicking a love-tap against his jaw. Mr. Switchblade's friend wilted like a half-price bouquet.

_Smash! _

Oooh. Looked like Hi-ya and Blackjack had had a mutual misunderstanding due to Blonde's just-snatched pool cue, and were currently admiring the pretty whiskey-smears on the floor. Remnants of said pool cue were still being twirled through Blonde's fingers, and Mr. Fist looked to be having second thoughts-

_Thwam!_

Flashing lights, world graying out, a feeling like somebody'd dropped a truck on my head - right. Wood. Another pool cue, in fact.

Okay. _Now_ I was ticked. I snatched hard wood before it could give me another tap on the skull, gave Blonde a side-order of glare to go with her sudden wrist-strain. No dice, lady. You don't move this stick until I _want_ you to move it. "Hey! Do I look like one of these tricycle trash-apes to you?"

...Way to go, King. You want some mustard to go with that shoe leather?

Which was about the last snarky comment my brain got to make, before it got busy in the 3-D chess-with-knives less knowledgeable types call a barfight.

Blonde twisted her cue away as I turned to meet our next contestant, laying smack-down on Mr. Fist like it was going out of style. I ducked, bobbed, and let loose with a hay-maker or two, all while reminding my aching skull these were ordinary guys. Slimy, yeah, and deserving of a night in the ER, but ordinary. Pulled punches was the order of the day here.

Not something bothering my dance partner, especially as the rest of the drunks pitched in and chairs and bottles smashed. She was mowing them down like no one her size should. Not in my weight class, not by a long shot - but there was definitely more to this lady than met the eye.

Given what she was dishing out right here and now, I'd hate to be the guys she was _really_ mad at.

---------

_Sam_

I shouldn't be having this much fun. Really, I shouldn't. Getting banned from O'Malley's for life thanks to those darn drugging armbands was a fluke; get banned from here, too, on just one beer? People would start to see a trend.

But for once in my life, just once, I had a clear-cut problem at hand and the means to solve it.

Damned if I wasn't going to take it.

Still, all the chaos and adrenaline in the world couldn't disguise the fact that I was very, very lucky. Tall, Dark, and Snarky had shrugged off my hit like Teal'c would a lucky shot from an SGC rookie; yeah, it stung, yeah, he wasn't happy about it - but he didn't take it personally.

Matter of fact, he seemed just as relieved as I was to have something physical to fight. Made me wonder what demons _he_ was running from.

But that was a passing thought, little flashes in-between busting heads. Here and now, all I cared about was that there was someone watching my back as I cut through the crowd to the bartender. "Keys!" Set me up for the local slime, will you? Asshole.

"Ah, sorry, I can't-"

"I hate this," my unlikely ally muttered through the crashing glass. "I really hate this, it ain't nice - but we're in a hurry, and I _don't_ like you." He glared at the bartender. "Give. Her. The keys."

As if he were in a trance, the bartender held out a fistful of jingling metal.

Weird. Very weird.

But I snatched my car keys anyway, ready to make a break for it-

Somebody swiped them from me, almost breaking my fingers in the process. Spitting a few Cimmerian curse-words I'd learned from Gairwyn, I went after him.

From then on, things got confusing.

Keys flipped one way. Snarky went after it. He had them for a second, then lost them as a foam-flecked biker took after my bad example and slammed him in the ribs with a barstool. I grabbed for the flying metal, lost it to a face-full of teeth that were very sorry they'd ever met my pool cue. And so on.

Time goes weird in a fight, but I was pretty sure it was less than two minutes later when everybody but us was down, Snarky was fishing my keys out of somebody's limp hand-

"I've got two people busting up my bar..."

And the bartender was on the line to the cops. Perfect.

Snarky and I traded a look, then dashed out into the shivery rain for the parking lot. Well, sort of dashed. I'd only had _one_ beer...

A trenchcoated arm caught me as I slumped against my car. "Lady? You okay? I thought I got the only guy with a knife, but I coulda missed one-"

"Nah; jus' tired," I managed, straightening. "Always forget how bad the crash is after a fight- hey!"

He carried me around the car anyway, unlocking it one-handed, then pouring me into the passenger seat with the other. Shut the door and dashed back to the driver's side; starting the car, snicking his seatbelt home, and pulling out of the parking lot in one smooth move that spoke of way too much time slinking out of bad spots.

Not that I could talk. I mean, how many times has my team broken the local laws when we're on missions? Even if they _are_ other planets' laws. Heck, if you look at it from the intergalactic perspective, Earth constitutes a "rogue planet" as far as the Asgaard and the System Lords are concerned...

And - I was a passenger in my own car, being driven who-knew-where by a guy I'd met in a barfight. Oh yeah. I was hitting all cylinders tonight. The colonel would have my ass-

Only, no, he wouldn't. Which was part of the problem, wasn't it? The only guy I had a real interest in was completely and utterly off-limits, due to his being my ranking officer. If I really _was_ interested in him. Anise's zatarc detector said so, but - the Tok'ra had a way of twisting things to get what _they_ wanted, the truth be damned. After all, the Tau'ri were an "infantile" race; and who worries about lying to kids? Especially when it's for their own good.

The Tok'ra had my father with them. They knew how military regs worked. Get me and the colonel involved, and SG-1 would self-destruct.

Which might be exactly what they wanted. Two thousand years they'd been chipping away at the System Lords' forces, after all, and barely made a dent. We come along, and Goa'uld start dying like flies. It _had_ to be ticking the High Council off.

Oh, they still wanted an alliance with the SGC. We had easy access to hosts - which they wanted. We had firepower, information gathered from other planets, and a Stargate the System Lords couldn't touch - which they also wanted.

And we had me. Which they _really_ wanted. "Jolinar's memories should be among her people," the latest Tok'ra to visit with my Dad had mentioned a few hours back, before Jacob shut him up at the look on my face. Uh-huh. Right. The Tok'ra didn't _have_ humans living with them. Which basically meant they wanted me to take on another snake... symbiote. They're symbiotes. Living in your head, sharing... though the longer Dad stayed with them, the less he acted like _Jacob_ and the more like the stick-in-the-mud Council...

No. Way. Not now. Not ever.

The more I thought about it, the madder I got. And it really hadn't helped that our new shrink, Dr. John Baird, hadn't _known_ the Tok'ra were about to drop in - for allies, they've got a real bad habit of not calling ahead first - so we'd both thought I had the day free of interplanetary concerns. Which had made it a good day to pick at some of the old scars SGC life had left, try to clean them out and get my head back on straight before the next crisis.

Today, we'd been talking about Russia. About nearly getting carved up like a lab rat by my own planet's people... this is Earth, it's supposed to be _safe_...

And just about the time Dr. Baird was about to hand me the tissues, the 'Gate klaxon rang. And - I had to do my job. I had to.

The second I was relieved for the day, I'd just - left. Bound and determined to get somewhere no one knew me, sit down with good beer, and get so plastered they had to pour me into the cab.

What can I say? It seemed like a good idea at the time.

Focus, Sam. Brown-haired guy driving. "And you are...?"

"King," he offered, casually driving the speed limit as local black-and-whites whipped by, lights and siren blaring as they headed for the Lizard Lounge. "Hannibal King." Brown brows quirked the question at me.

"Carter."

"Ah." He nodded. "Army? Air Force? Kinda doubt Navy, not out here..."

"How-?"

"Good technique." A wry grin. "Of the 'take 'em down before they take you' kind. _Not_ the dojo."

I bristled a little; just because the colonel's hand-to-hand was a little rougher, didn't mean it didn't work-

Oh. Right. It does work. Because the colonel's a professional.

And... just what kind of line of work is this King in, to recognize that? "I'm an astrophysicist."

"Geshundeit."

Oh, come on! "I study-"

"Stars, galaxies, speed of light near weird things like black holes, whole universes bein' created from specks of De Sitter space... am I gettin' warm?"

I blinked. "Ah..."

His left hand gripped the wheel; his right dug into a pocket inside his coat, came out with a business card. "That's me."

_Borderline Investigations,_ I read; clear black print on a white background that included the odd logo of a targeting scope over a crescent moon. And an address. "You had a case take you all the way out here from San Francisco?"

"Road trip," he said shortly. "So what the hell brought that on, Carter? Astrophysicists may be walking in the stratosphere most of the time, but anybody that sticks it out in the Air Force has to have one foot on solid ground. You saw those guys coming. Why the hell didn't you just take off?"

"Like you did?" I snap back. So now he's narrowed it down to Air Force? Either he's quick, or he's guessing. "As soon as you go back for your car, they'll be all over you. If I know cops, they'd just _love_ to throw an out-of-town PI into a holding tank on general principles."

"Probably." And why doesn't he sound more upset about that? "Only my car ain't at the bar."

"You walked?" I snort. In this rain?

"Flat tire."

I can't help it; I snicker. Big, tough, macho PI, and he can't change a flat tire?

"On the side of the highway, in the dark, with a busted jack." Hannibal sounds about as disgusted as the colonel contemplating a site inspection. "We are now officially in the territory of _don't try this at home._"

Point. Not that I have to let him know that.

A sensible guy? Nah. Couldn't be.

We drove along in silence for a while longer, each of us glancing at the rearview mirrors every time headlights flash by. Never know when the cops might catch on. I didn't _think_ the bartender had gotten a good look at my car, but...

I squinted at the side mirror; rolled down my window to wipe raindrops off it. Ah, better. For a second there, I'd thought I was a lot more drunk than I could have gotten on one beer; Hannibal had looked kind of washed out in the silvered glass. Almost... ghostly.

Darn rain. Darn Tok'ra. Darn everything.

"So," Hannibal said warily. "Where the hell are we going, anyway?"

I couldn't help it. I started laughing.

---------

_Hannibal_

I'm gonna regret this in the morning. Oh yeah. I can feel it.

But hell. Sounds like Carter's having a worse week than I am. If that's humanly possible.

"Hey." I patted her on the shoulder, careful to keep it casual. "You're not dead yet."

Hysterical laughter hiccuped, caught off-guard. "Wha-?"

"If they haven't killed you, they haven't won yet." 'Course, in some cases, even killing you didn't mean they'd won. Not if they didn't make it _permanent_.

"Who's 'they'?"

Suspicion. Definite suspicion there. So there _is_ a 'they'. Hell. I don't want to get involved-

Ah, screw it.

"Whoever," I shrug, eyes on the road. "_Illegitimati non carborundum_, an' all that." And I nearly slapped myself on the head, thanking god I'm not in my old library right now. Speaking Latin in front of mystical texts is a good way to get fried.

Carter sucked in a breath, and snickered.

Whoa. She actually got that? Since when do astrophysicists know Latin?

"So... who's they for you?" she asked warily.

Um. Not mentioning vampires, not mentioning sorcerers, definitely not mentioning demons and extra-dimensional gateways...

Ah, what the heck. She's a listening ear I'm never going to see again in my life. And damn it, I _hurt_. "You know where I can find a good place to get a drink?"

A snort. "What, you can't talk about it sober?"

"Not if I can help it," I mutter. "Bad breakup."

"Yeah?" Blonde brows go up; definite challenge there. "How bad?"

"Scale of one to ten, one bein' not putting the cap on the toothpaste, ten bein' finding out she's actually Kull's soul-sucking Witch-Queen of Atlantis out to conquer the world - I'd say eight. Yeah. About that."

Was that a stifled snicker from the other seat? "What's so funny?" I grumble.

"Witch-Queen of Atlantis?" Carter breaks down, giggling.

But it's a normal giggle this time; just tired, and a little worn at the edges. I can live with it. "So. About that drink?"

---------

"-Yeah. Yeah, thanks." Absently listening to a much more pleasant background rumble from the tavern behind me, I scribbled down the tow service address. "Appreciate it." After a few more pleasantries I hung up, and headed over to the little side booth where Carter was drinking a cola and keeping an eye on my glass of something a lot stronger. "They're heading out to get it now."

"Really." Blue eyes were dark and skeptical.

"The wonders of plastic." I picked up my small whiskey, gave her black silence another glance. "Hey, I wouldn't still be in this line of work if I couldn't tell when someone was pulling a fast one." Not that you can really catch heartbeats over the phone; receiver's not good enough for that. But voices, yeah - and I can hear voice stresses clear as day.

"Must be nice," Carter murmured bitterly.

Yeah, I guess. Small favors. Like the fact that for better or worse, this much whiskey wouldn't make me any more drunk than Carter's beer had made her. Made following suspects from bar to bar a lot easier. Not much, when I balanced it against-

_Stop that,_ I told myself. _Stop that right now. It_ happened. _Frost happened. And it wasn't your fault. _

_But Tatjana was,_ part of me snarled back, angry and hurting. _You did that to her! If you hadn't turned her, she never would have-_

_Says who?_ the saner part shot back. _Frost was a lunatic, but I didn't kill! She could have fought the bloodlust. She could have..._

But she didn't.

I couldn't stop her. Not now. PI versus CIA agent - she had a hell of a lot more resources to hide than I had to find her. I needed a passport, cash, connections. And most of all, time to think.

Because the next time I saw her... I'd have to kill her.

_Tatjana. I'm sorry. _

But Tatjana wasn't here, and Carter was. And she sounded like everything she should have been able to count on in her world had crumbled under her. Kind of like I'd felt, waking up that first night years ago, cold and thirsty and just barely beginning to realize how deep I'd stepped in it. "You want to talk about it?"

She stirred the ice in her glass with a finger. "Can't."

"Ah." Since when do they classify astrophysicists?

_Oh, wake up, Hannibal. NORAD's not that far from here. They may not have SHIELD an' stuff to look after in this world, but they've still got satellites up the gizatch. Plenty to slap under 'Eyes Only' and worse._

I tapped a finger on the table, thinking. "Okay. Forget work. You want to tell me about the guy whose skull you really wanted to crack?"

She flinched, but shook it off. "Doesn't matter." Her lips pressed into a grim line. "He's dead."

"Doesn't mean he can't still mess up your life something nasty," I grumbled, thinking of Frost. Guy had been all too dead, or undead, first time we'd ever crossed paths. And things had only gone downhill from there.

"It'll never happen again."

"Says who?" I groused. Hell, I knew _that_ line. Had listened to it from Doc Strange in Castle Mordo when the fangs were gone, staring into the dawn and being told I'd never, ever feel the blood-thirst again.

Only guess what? That very same doctor had to leave a copy of the _Vampiric Verses_ lying around where LaVeau could get at it, and less than two years later I'm sitting on the floor in my own agency as he poofs out, trying to wrap my mind around the fact that healing spells or not, every cell in my body _remembered_ being a vampire...

And with the Montesi Formula up in smoke, they wanted blood all over again.

Well. There went that glass.

Carter raised a blonde brow as I signaled the waitress for another. "How drunk were you planning on getting?"

"Enough." Enough so it stops hurting. For a while. Enough so when I take the little thermos out of my coat later and slurp it down, I don't taste the red. Much. "So. Dead guy. Your problem with him was...?"

Carter squirmed. "It _won't_ happen again." Stirred ice some more. "Just a- a fluke. Crazies with scalpels..."

I couldn't help it; I shuddered. "God, there's more of 'em?"

She gave me a hard look.

Uh-oh. Think fast, Hannibal, no way is the truth gonna fly here...

But sharp as she was, no way would a lie do, either.

Right. Word-dicing time. "Okay, let me give you a hypothetical... say you're a crazy Nazi-wannabe with medical training who believes he's made pacts with the dark gods." Malpractice was definitely that. "Now, say you read about this guy who got bitten by a rabid bat-"

Which Frost was, kind of, part of the time.

"Got declared dead-"

Which I _definitely_ was - lucky for me, not as Hannibal King, given I was working undercover at that point.

"Then got off the slab and went back to work," I shrugged. "If you _were_ this crazy, well... you might just figure you'd found yourself a vampire. And, well, vampires, immortal - way to get your unstoppable Nazi stormtroopers to take over the world. Not to mention, if you don't die, you never have to pay up all those mortgaged-soul deals, right?" I waved a finger before she could explode. "But everybody knows the Undead don't bring just _anybody_ across. So why take the chance? Forget conning him into biting somebody you've got under your thumb; just dissect him, find out why he's immortal, and go from there." I tried to pull off a smile. Couldn't. "If my partners hadn't shown up, I'd be in little pieces all over the bastard's lab."

Whatever Carter would have said got cut off by a pretty brunette in a low-cut red blouse and black skirt with the drink tray. "Thanks, Miss." I paid for the next glass, with a fair tip on the side. "Might be a few more of these."

She shrugged her shoulders to show off her cleavage, slid in a smile for me and a calculating glance toward my temporary booth partner. "We call cabs."

"Good to know." I waited until she sashayed off, getting in one nice glimpse of leg, then spread my empty hand. "So. Crazies with scalpels, check. And if you think you're overreacting 'cause it 'won't happen again', especially if some idiots are telling you it _can't_ happen again, it was just a fluke - _I'd_ tell 'em to go to hell. Flukes _happen._ And if the hairs keep standing up on the back of your neck for no good reason... well, maybe you just haven't found the reason yet." Another shrug. "Trust your instincts, and watch your back. Works for me."

"Vampire?" Carter said faintly.

"I do a lot of night work." Not as much as I used to have to. Sunlight doesn't turn me into crispy-fries anymore; at least, not fast. Slather on maximum sunblock, I can even walk outside at noon.

Still stings, though. And I hate it. And I _hate_ that I hate it; that deep down in my gut, where most people have cravings for kitten-fuzzies and hot-fudge sundaes and long, lazy summer days at the beach-

I want the night. Wolves howling. Wind in my hair. Blood on my tongue. Mist curling around my fingertips...

Solid, Hannibal. Stay solid.

That's probably what got Tatjana. The senses, the power... it just feels _so good_ to let go and use it. To be the predator. The night-stalker. The monster.

Looks like this glass isn't gonna last much longer either.

Better slow down, then. Much as I _wanted_ to get blind drunk - I couldn't. I didn't dare. Tatjana Stiles wasn't the first time I'd ever sunk my fangs into a living creature; feeding off animals cuts the craving more than cold human blood. She wasn't even the first time I'd bitten a human. Or at least, semi-human; thank you, Michael Morbius, for making _that_ self-defense.

But she was the first time I didn't stop.

Blood, sex, addiction - the magic that makes a vampire what it is means we're all screwed up in the head. I just happen to _know_ my brain's tied in nasty knots. Which meant I knew damn well I was a junkie teetering on the edge between the soft stuff and pure, soul-killing hardline. Get drunk around pretty ladies, who wouldn't take more than a smile and a look for me to get them out in a dark alley, where no one would hear them scream?

No. Never again. _Ever._

"Alien abductee."

I blinked, dragged back to the present. "What?"

"That's... what he thought I was. Before he tried to..." Carter gave me a shadowed smile. "Crazy, huh?"

"Might be why they call 'em psychos," I shrugged. "Just a hunch."

"I was lucky; Daniel figured out I was missing-" She lifted her shoulders, let them fall. "It is over, though."

_Long as you remember, it's not over._ But she looked like she could figure that out for herself. I lifted my glass. "Let's hear it for luck. And good friends."

Some of the shadows faded out of her smile. "I'll drink to that." She lifted her soda. "I'm Sam."

And somehow, that hole where Tatjana had been didn't hurt quite so much. "So... ah..." Oh, great. Expert PI caught in battle of wits unarmed; film at eleven.

Another passing waitress brought a waft of fried chicken in her wake, and my stomach decided to remind me it wasn't _all_ vampire.

Sam snickered at the growl, and picked up the laminated menu tucked up against the wall. "Every man for himself."

A wry grin tugged at my lips. "I'll go for that."

---------

_Sam_

Well, this is interesting.

I've actually had a nice, quiet, non-world-threatened dinner. With a guy who isn't an alien megalomaniac bent on galactic domination, a slimy Pentagon staffer trying to pump me for information on the SGC, a misogynistic "women shouldn't be in combat" type ignoring the fact I have a mind and a perfectly good trigger finger, or just Joe Average staring at my cleavage.

My legs, maybe. But not my cleavage.

Not that Hannibal's done much in the way of staring at anything, outside of his plate and his drink. Whoever this Tatjana is, she broke him up pretty badly.

_"I want to hire you to find my husband's killers."_

Hands, words, a sardonic twist of lip - I can _see_ her standing in Hannibal's doorway from his sketch of that day, slinky black dress, ruby necklace, and all. A vamp of a lady he only later found out was no grieving widow, but an intelligence operative, out to stop Navarro, a South American Indian terrorist with access to chemical WMD. Oh, the killers were real enough; but they'd taken out her partner, not her husband, to retrieve critical info he'd grabbed from Navarro's underlings.

And I can see Hannibal kicking himself for falling for the story, and falling for her, even as he tries to forgive her for what she did. She couldn't let terrorists walk. No matter what it took.

Just like I can see what that bastard Navarro must have done to her, in the horror in his eyes.

Hannibal got pretty tight-lipped on the details after that; exploding terrorists, hospital, critical ward. And - what really perks my ears - "experimental treatment".

Something Hannibal thinks has twisted her mind.

Oh, he didn't say it that way. Just that Tatjana got better, and she seemed to be handling the aftermath - but then she disappeared. And weeks later, he found a brief blurb in a newspaper about two mysterious deaths: Iraqi guards, during a search for terrorist weapons overseas.

_"It was her. It had to be her."_ He'd shaken his head; so utterly down, I wanted to haul him into a psych ward on suicide watch. _"It's my fault. I said yes, an'... it's my fault."_

Intelligence operative. In a black dress, not a white one. Meaning she probably wasn't from the Firm. Working inside the U.S., which is _illegal_ for the CIA. Roping in a civilian because he was mentioned in Navarro's list of dangerous people - and just how did _Hannibal_ make that list? - instead of grabbing the FBI, the NSA, SWAT, and all the rest of the alphabet soup to take the terrorist down hard.

Houston, my NID-sense is tingling.

Experimental treatment. Healed incredible damage. Created drastic personality change. Specifically, megalomania.

No. They couldn't be that stupid.

_NID. They sure as heck_ could _be that stupid, and you know it._

Carefully - and thanking all my lucky stars I'd stuck to soda - I'd turned the tables and started asking Hannibal for more details. Not directly; two whiskies or not, Hannibal still seemed only mildly buzzed. But roundabout, drawing him out by mentioning some of my own disaster of a love life.

Including Martouf. Pain calls to pain, and I could still feel that utter, gut-wrenching grief as he died in my arms...

Hannibal grabbed napkins for me to soak. Kept the wait-staff at bay while I cried myself out. Was just _there,_ making me feel so guiltily glad.

But anyway. By the time we'd finished dinner and I'd bundled him into a cab, it'd worked. I had a name.

_Tatjana Stiles. _

Quite possibly host to an NID-acquired symbiote.

Damn it.

"Maybe I'll see you around sometime," I smiled at Hannibal as he got in the passenger side.

"Yeah." His smile back was still sad, still haunted. But at least it didn't make me want to turn him in to a shrink for his own good. "That wouldn't be too bad."

And off he went. Some broken-hearted, lucky schmuck of a PI who'd never know about aliens, or Goa'uld, or how close Earth rides to death every day.

Life is just not fair.

---------

_Hannibal_

_"Maybe I'll see you around sometime." _

_"Yeah. That wouldn't be too bad..."_

Little words, playing over and over again in my head as Sam started her car and my cab turned out of the tavern driveway. Just the kind of thing two strangers turned friendly acquaintances might say to each other.

So how come they felt like a rope yanking me out of hell?

Maybe... because they were so simple. So human.

I'm not human. I wanted to be - god, I wanted to be! I struggled through the Depression like everyone else in Milwaukee, got married, got drafted, ended up in the Pacific, lived through that, got back to my wife seein' another guy, lived through _that_, got divorced, went PI, investigated a certain warehouse at night - and didn't live through that.

I had almost two years of normal, thanks to luck and Strange. Outside of that, I've been part of the nightlife for over half a century.

Which means... if I _had_ been normal, I'd probably be dead by now.

Yow.

Usually I tried not to think about that. The fifties are gone, the sixties were weird, the seventies are gone - thank _god_ - and I'm still kind of bug-eyed about being in the years that start a century instead of finishing one. Much less being in those years in a whole 'nother version of Earth.

But still. If I hadn't kept going, Frost would have killed Blade. Meaning he wouldn't have been around to help Frank, and none of us would have been there to help Strange with Dracula. Much less build up Borderline, and help all the people we did. And we _did_ help people. A lot of them. We saved lives.

Just like I did, helping Tatjana.

I shouldn't have turned her. That was a bad call. Up there with taking a job from Lilith the Demon-Queen bad - though then I'd _known_ the strange lady was playing us, and we were deliberately heading into the trap to spring it.

I screwed up. No two ways about it. I'd been tortured and horrified and just trying to save one life out of the rubble Navarro had tried to make of my morality - and I screwed up. Bad.

But if I let what Tatjana did - what she _chose_ to do - drive me over the edge, let it knock me into the black pit of despair where all I could see was the monster I was and not the man I tried to be... then Navarro won. Even if he was dead.

Hell with that!

"So." The cabbie chewed on a toothpick, heading slow and easy down the road. "Which hotel did you want again?"

Leaning back in the passenger seat, I winced. I wanted an aspirin, a slug of blood, and a solid day's sleep. Not necessarily in that order.

What I got was a look in the rearview, and a screaming bad feeling about the nondescript dark sedan following Sam's car out of the tavern lot.

Ah, hell. Didn't I say I wasn't getting involved?

But she was a nice lady, and she listened, and...

For the first time in weeks, she'd made me feel like I'd done something right with my life.

I jabbed a thumb behind us. "Follow that car."

---------

"Evening."

"Aaah!"

_Crunch._

"You know," I said conversationally, dropping what used to be Peeping Tom's nine-millimeter as the wide-eyed suit tried to back up, "I just _hate_ guns."

I know. Not subtle. But me and subtle kind of had a mutual avoidance pact at the moment, due to a preponderance of evidence and observations on El Creepo, here. The Lizard Lounge bartender, I just didn't like too much. This guy, I could work up a serious case of grudge over.

I'd instructed my delighted cabbie in the finer points of vehicle surveillance as we drove along, tailing this slime two, sometimes three cars back. El Creepo, in turn, had kept a more-or-less constant distance - not number of cars, but distance - from Sam.

Electronic surveillance, I'd bet on it. And not that long later, after I'd paid off one happy cabbie to drop me a block away from where my subjects stopped, I'd collected. One good sneak and a squirm under Sam's car, and I knew what I was looking at. The bastard had bugged her.

Question was, why?

For a second there I didn't _care_ why; just saw red, reached up to pull it off and shred it-

No. Stop. _Think._

I lifted my shaking fingers away from the little black box, trying to breathe through the blinding rage. Another nasty thing about being on the wrong side of the grave. Your temper gets a real shot in the arm. Not a hair trigger, not if you didn't have one before - but once something does finally get under your skin, you tend to stay mad. And not just slash the tires and key the paint mad. We're talking rip out throats and leave bodies scattered to the four winds.

I'd done that. Once. Been face to face with a whole cult of demon-worshippers after I'd summoned some mutts for extra backup, listened to them praising the kind of evil that had ruined Blade's life, and Frank's, and mine-

And lost it. Utterly.

_I_ hadn't laid a hand on them. But god, I almost wish I had.

I tracked down the dogs, later. Made sure they didn't remember anything, and went to no-kill shelters. Least I could do.

Easy, Hannibal. You've done this before. Focus on the little things. Gravel digging through your coat. Mountain ground leaching cold into you. Get the demon back into its cage. Easy...

Okay. Now. Which way did he go?

"False alarm," a whisper carried on the wind. "Subject appears to have been simply out of usual territory for a date."

Ah. That way.

"Unknown." El Creepo had found himself a fairly good hidey-hole in some adult's imitation of a kid's tree-house, watching Carter's house through IR binocs. "Was present in the Red Boar Tavern when subject reacquired. Check the credit card receipts. Five-ten, brown on brown-"

Five-_eleven,_ you asshole.

So. Carter wasn't imagining things.

Damn.

Misting into the shadows behind the blond in the suit, I let El Creepo finish up his report, thinking hard. High-tech equipment, formal call-in protocol - and creepiest of all, that casual assumption they could get their hands on credit card records to find out who I was. _Organized_ bad guys.

Or - I gritted my teeth to play devil's advocate - maybe not. Carter hadn't said what she did, but it was obviously classified, and she was just as obviously stressed out about it. Could be organized good guys, checking to see if she still deserved what clearance she had.

And pigs could be flying south right this minute. You never know.

So I made my entrance, and got a nine-mil in my face.

Did I mention I don't like guns?

"_Listen_ to me..."

Only when I had his mind in my grasp did I realize how risky this was. I was angry. Tired. Just a little drunk. I wouldn't let me drive like this, much less do open-brain surgery.

Okay. Improvise. "We're going to talk," I ordered, _feeling_ the words echo around in his skull. "When we're done, you're going to forget we ever had this conversation. Understand?"

"Yes..."

"You saw me," I go on, keeping a lid on my temper, "but you didn't get as good a look as you thought. Maybe it was dark. Maybe there were too many people inside. Whatever works. You can't pick me out of a lineup."

"I can't pick you out..."

"Good. Glad we understand each other." I let go of his will, and grabbed onto his collar instead. "Who the hell are you, and why are you watching Carter's house?"

"Fu-" The blond kicked and twisted; tried a knife-hand to my throat-

_Bad_ idea.

I didn't hurt him. Much. Just bent and twisted a few joints, ending up with his face pressed to the wood planks, his arm twisted up behind his back in a hold that wouldn't break it unless he did something else stupid, and me sighing like the ex-MP I used to be. "Tom, Tom; you're really disappointing me here."

"My name's not-" He wised up, and clammed up.

"Let's just say it is. 'Cause we're having such a nice, friendly conversation, here... and I'd hate for it to get unfriendly, _capisce?_"

"Yeah," he gasped. "How the hell did you-?"

"You were too busy drooling over your subject," I said dryly. "Bad technique, guy. Could've stampeded a herd of elephants up here, and you'd just be lost in that pretty pink haze of, is she boxers or briefs?"

He gulped. Hah! Bingo! "So," I went on, chat-casual, "who do you work for?"

He sneered. "I don't know who you are, buddy, but trust me - you don't want to know."

"No-" I upped the pressure on his arm, just a little, "I really, really do."

"Aggh... all right, all _right!_ I'm working for her ex-husband-"

I snorted. "Exactly _how_ dumb do I look?"

Silence. "It's a matter of national security," he bit out.

"And I should care about this why? Never mind." Yeah, I'm American. First and foremost, though, I'm on the side of them what wants to live and let live. Frost crossed that line with me, and I never left his trail until I _found_ him. Even if it did take me almost fifty years. "So you say you're a Fed. Where's your ID?"

"Son of a- left front pocket! I'm going to have you up for _assault-_"

"Oh yeah? Before or after the people who own this place have you up on trespassing? I bet the jury will _love_ hearing about this fine, upstanding young Fed in a kid's tree-house at night with spyglasses." Not that it was a _kid's_ tree-house, from the magazines tucked into the corners. But juries are funny that way.

More silence.

"Yeah. That's what I thought." Somebody here was up to no good. And it was looking less and less likely to be Carter.

I fished his ID out, reading it quick; too dark for most people's eyes, yeah sure, but to me, might as well have been broad day.

What the heck was _Homeland Security?_

_No SHIELD,_ I thought. _No Avengers. Heck, not even any Excalibur over in Britain. Which means no Good Guys out there people can see an' feel like the world can't go too wrong. No Hydra, Magneto, or Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, either - but you_ know _there are bad-guy supernatural types loose, hiding in the woodwork like Navarro. Which means people have gotta have this bad feeling about the world they pin onto what they_ can _see. Which would be - other people._

Felt like a good guess. But I wanted to back it up with some research before I made any moves based on it. Starting with this guy-

_Snk. Shing._

I know that sound. You didn't last two weeks around Blade without knowing that sound.

'Course, the reason _I_ know it so well is the nightmares; his hand wrapped in my collar, his eyes glowing red with the Darkhold's spell, his katana coming across-

Which is weird, because what he really used was an axe.

Best I could figure it, Blade's possession and betrayal had shaken me so much, my subconscious had wrapped up what really happened with what I'd seen the last time I'd felt the world go tilt that bad. Which would be scattered, beheaded corpses on the damnedest set of islands in the Pacific I _never_ wanted to see again.

Not like there was much I could do about it, except try to ride it out. Walk into a VA hall for WWII post-traumatic stress compounded by supernatural trauma? Yeah, right.

Besides, it wasn't that bad. Just nightmares. Everybody's got nightmares. Mine are just a little more... _colorful._

I shook myself back to here-and-now, listening to the growl down below. "Carson Springs PD," a man bit out. "Get down here. Hands up."

A woman's sigh, touched with gun oil. "Ryan, he can't-"

"I can smell him, Mel. The guy he's got can't hear us - but he can. Trust me."

Hell. I should mist on out of here-

But damn it, I didn't _want_ to. Didn't want to give into the curse that much. The vampire. It's monsters and crooks that slink off into the night when the cops come calling, not humans and PIs.

Maybe I wasn't human, but I could at least hang onto the PI.

Besides. That scent in the wind, a taint of wolf and human and pure magic... _that_ was a cop? In Sam's backyard?

I sighed a little. "You gonna help me keep a grip on this guy?" I murmured. "He was peeping on the nice lady in the house next door."

"That depends," the cool shrug rang through Ryan's voice. "How many quarts were you planning on leaving him with?"

I stiffened. "Are you _kidding_ me? I wasn't gonna-"

"Good." The cop's tone thawed out a little. "Come on down, and let's talk."

Easier said than done. But I managed, bundling El Creepo, crushed gun, binoculars, and all down the rough ladder into the waiting cuffs of a nice-looking lady detective with a flashlight, stormy blue eyes, mahogany hair cut short and pretty, and a semi-automatic that had seen way more use than the one I'd mangled.

Professional, too. Mel got her prisoner squared away before she let herself go bug-eyed over crumpled steel. "Holy..."

I let it slide, matching stares with the wolf-yellow glare of the tall, dark-haired guy pointing a katana my way. Actually pointing, not just aiming; Ryan had taken up some weird, left-handed stance I'd never seen a kenjutsu type use, that was obviously meant to skewer rather than slash. "Evening, Officer."

His smile showed a hint of teeth. "Mind if we see some ID?"

"Well, here's his." I held it up in the light for Mel, making no sudden moves. "Mind if we don't talk near the bastard?"

"Hey!"

"You are a bastard, Harry," I said matter-of-factly, noting how Mel had made sure the guy was turned so he couldn't see the sword. Harry Thompson, according to his ID. No wonder he'd jumped when I called him Tom. "Didn't Mrs. Thompson teach her kids anything? The policeman is your _friend._"

Ah. The lovely sound of teeth grinding.

Mel traded a partner-type glance with Ryan, then held the flashlight while he made his sword vanish under his trenchcoat and patted El Creepo down, coming up with at least one holdout .22 and a bunch of illicit electronic gizmos. "Mr. Thompson," Ryan said evenly, "would you like to tell us what you were doing up there on the Montgomery family's property?"

"I have _every right_-"

I tuned El Creepo out, listening into the dark for any other cops. None.

But somehow, I didn't think Ryan was alone.

_Somebody out there is really,_ really _good._

_"On what charge?"_

"Trespassing, for starters..."

I glanced back toward Thompson at the yell. Ooo. Look at the pretty red flush!

On second thought - don't look. Don't listen to the pound of an outraged heart. Don't smell that adrenaline-laced sweat, and think how that raging red would taste...

Dimly I heard Mel drag El Creepo off to her car, lock him in and head for the front door of the house where people were waking up; probably to get the Montgomerys' verbal confirmation and dot the legal i's that this guy was, indeed, not just a casual acquaintance dropping in unannounced, but a bona fide trespasser of the perverted kind.

Ryan... didn't leave. "You going to be all right, sir?"

I shrugged. Hell with it; he could smell me, he could probably smell this even with the lid on.

Digging out my thermos, I took a long, chill drink.

God. I feel like scum. Every damn time.

Recapping the red, I flicked a business card his way. "Hannibal King. I don't exactly rate a _sir._"

"Detective Ryan O'Connell."

And him looking at least half Japanese. Only in America.

"Homicide."

I stiffened. "Now, look-"

"Easy." He held out a friendly hand; but his left didn't stray too far from that sword. "They dump the weird cases on us, too. Which makes it a good place for me." He gave me a slight smile. "You want to tell me what happened here tonight?"

"You want a straight answer to that?" I muttered.

"You want Thompson cooling his heels overnight?" Ryan arched a dark brow.

Point. "I - ah - met Ms. Carter in a bar a little earlier this evening..."

---------

Translations and Info:

_Illegitimati non carborundum_ - "Don't let the bastards grind you down." Yes, it's bad Latin. It's supposed to be.

Short history of Hannibal King for Stargate fans: Sometime in the forties, in another universe, a hardboiled detective with a heart of gold was investigating factory espionage when a white-haired vampire, Deacon Frost, killed everyone inside. Including him. But after three days on a morgue slab, Hannibal got up and went back to work...

Many decades later, Hannibal King, Doctor Strange (Marvel Earth's Sorcerer Supreme), Blade, Francis Drake, and others cooperated to cast a spell (the Montesi Formula) that would wipe all vampires from the face of the planet. As a vampire himself, Hannibal collapsed as the spell was taking effect - but Doctor Strange was able to medically revive him, due to the mystical effects of a vow Hannibal had sworn the first night he woke: that he would never take a human life to sustain his thirst for blood. (_Dr. Strange #62._ A vow I would say Hannibal still, technically, has not broken - he turned Tatjana Stiles because she was already dying, not to feed.) As far as everyone knew, Hannibal King was human again; able to walk in sunlight, eat garlic, shave, and take as much damage from a punch as anyone else.

When the Montesi Formula was later relaxed, Hannibal found out everyone was wrong.

In this AU, I'm presuming Dr. Strange in _Nightstalkers #1_ was correct - that Hannibal is neither a true vampire, nor human, but caught somewhere in between. Therefore, Hannibal's abilities and vulnerabilities have stopped wavering from one comic-book extreme to another (partly due to the inter-dimensional transit), and settled somewhere around the "dhampire" level.

Note this does _not_ incorporate the whole Marvel Universe. (The angst! The horror! The continuity problems - eeek!) Hannibal essentially stumbled through a "quantum mirror", and since his human Stargate-dimensional counterpart would be at least a decade or so dead, he has no entropic cascade failure to worry about.


	2. Chapter 2

_Daniel_

Either there's ringing in my ears, or Sam is humming.

I'm not sure which option is scarier.

I poked my head into her lab, glancing around for odd floating objects, inter-dimensional portals, or anything rumbling, glowing, or otherwise on that looks like it might have the word _reactor_ attached. It's not that I don't trust Sam. I do. Always. But Sam Carter the friend sometimes gets buried under Major-Doctor Carter the astrophysicist, and then things can go _boom_ in new and interesting ways.

No boom today. Looks like Sam just finished setting up some sort of computer search; she just _stretched_ out her arms, rolled her shoulders, and looked up at me with a three-coffee-cup smile. "Daniel! Morning!"

Er. Hmm. Backtrack. After all, I'd come here to give my friend a shoulder to cry on, after that mess yesterday. Because she was my friend... and, admittedly, because along with Jacob, that idiot Tok'ra Sermane was still _here,_ and I was sitting on a very non-'peaceful archaeologist' impulse to give him a practical lesson in applied cultural anthropology in reference to various human styles of self-defense. Which would be silly. A Tok'ra can out-strength me any day of the week. I _know_ that.

Which was why I was also sitting on the impulse to talk Teal'c into it instead.

Not that I thought Teal'c would be easy to convince. On the one hand he didn't like Sam being upset; on the other, he was a soldier the same as Jack was, and if the Tok'ra had a valid _tactical_ argument for wanting some way to call up what was left of Jolinar's memories on demand, he had to at least listen to it.

And Jack was doing one of the best neutral balancing acts on the subject I'd seen in a long time; sarcasm flying as he all but drew a line in the sand and said he'd rather be dead than snaked, yet almost in the same breath commiserating with Jacob on family and the kooky things they could get you into. And avoiding any _hypothetical_ questions from Sermane about whether the Earth-Tok'ra treaty might ever be invoked to request the assistance of specific teams - or, say, individuals - with all the neatness of a tiger shredding carpet.

All in all, yesterday had not been the kind of day I'd expect humming after.

"You look... rested," I venture.

"Despite my neighbors, yeah." At my raised eyebrow, Sam went on, "They had some kind of loud party, or break-in, or something; by the time I was out of the shower, it was all over but the cops hauling somebody off." She gave me a wry look. "You look pretty rested yourself. Given you just let somebody new near the _breakable_ artifacts..."

"He took down one bookshelf," I defended my hapless new assistant. Linguists with anthropological background are hard to come by; I don't know how the Air Force enticed Dr. Benkai Enomouto away from the University of Toronto, and I'm not sure I want to know. "You and Jack have both told me I had too much on it."

"One bookshelf, one pair of airmen carrying staff weapons, one just-boiling coffeepot..." Sam shook her head, grinning. "It's a good thing he has the cute lost scientist look down, or Janet's nurses would have him filleted."

"Cute lost scientist?" I managed, indignant. Hoping it covered the relief; evidently nobody else had noticed Ben had managed his bouts of clumsiness before he'd been threatened with shaking hands. So any suspicious minds in the SGC - and there were a lot - would have to face down that preconception of hapless clumsy four-eyed scientist before they could even consider the reality of kendo calluses.

I didn't _know_ why Ben didn't want people to look past the obvious. But I would. Soon.

It could just _be_ the obvious, after all; Japanese, even Japanese-Americans, can get touchy about people with Korean in their background. And Benkai had enough that even his Japanese had a little foreign flavor to it. Being underestimated could have been his way of getting by.

If it was, I'd have to talk him out of it. Just a little. We need academics, yes - but in an emergency, anyone might get thrown past the 'Gate, anytime. Everybody in the SGC would feel a lot better if they knew Ben could figure out which end of a gun was dangerous.

_I_ knew he did. Sooner or later, they would too.

"Cute," Sam said firmly. "Like a big-pawed puppy. I don't remember Ph.D.s being that way when I was in school."

"He must have started young," I shrugged. Though I had my suspicions about that, too. I couldn't be sure, not exactly, but there was a familiar _feel_ around him...

_Easy, Daniel,_ I told myself. _Give him a day to get settled in first. Then ask him if he's interested in borrowing the gym for a spar._

I was actually looking forward to that. Weird.

But then, I was looking forward to a lot more things these days. The situation with the NID had been bad. Was still bad. But after a certain attempted kidnapping had made the local TV news - well, General Hammond had apparently managed to burn up a few phone lines and win us some unofficial concessions. Including, among other things, the funds and official mandate to bring in more scientific staff. Hence the new trio of would-be exo-biologists now working under and around Janet, and Enomouto.

I had a wry feeling someone had meant that as a bribe.

_Later. Worry about that later,_ I told myself. _Right now, you've got off-world allies to deal with._ "I thought I'd give you a heads-up," I sighed. "We're going to have a briefing in half an hour..."

"A briefing with Sermane."

Ouch. There went the smile. "Sorry, Sam."

"No, it's... thanks, Daniel, really. I just..." Sam took a deep breath. "Oh, the heck with it. Half an hour?" She grabbed her phone, and started dialing. Shook her head when I turned to leave; _it's okay,_ she mouthed.

A phone call outside the Mountain? Curiosity, thy name is archaeologist.

Three rings. Four-

And Sam's face lit up like the first shafts of sun on a desert morning. "Hannibal? It's Sam. I just - wanted to make sure you got someplace to stay all right..." Listening, she blinked; then snickered.

I tilted my head at her, silently curious.

She held the receiver a bit away. "Mornings," Sam intoned, "were apparently invented by certain Dark Lords of the Abyss specifically to torment innocent PIs."

I choked on a laugh.

Sam turned back to the phone. "So you got the car- Oh, okay. Really? You are? But I thought you were just traveling- You didn't! _Hannibal_..."

I couldn't have left now if I'd wanted to. Oh, for Teal'c's ears. Sam met a PI? When?

"Just help with inquiries, huh?" Sam rolled her eyes. "So... you think you might still be somewhere in the area this Friday?" Her free hand played with a pen. "I mean, I know this bookstore, where people can go to get coffee... really? Oh. Ah. Well, my schedule's... a little weird sometimes. I should call you. Later. Bye." She hung up, and banged her head on the desk. "Oh, god... I am so screwed up."

"I like coffee, too," I offered. "Or maybe we could talk Teal'c into having some hot water and looming in the background. Just in case."

"I don't need _backup_ for a _coffee_," Sam grumbled.

"Sam, sometimes I feel like I need backup for a grocery run." I pushed my glasses up, trying to find the right words. "It's been a really bad year. If you want to bring a sidearm - or a friend - just to have a cup of coffee... well, do it. You deserve that coffee." I looked away a little. "I think we all do."

"Maybe." A flicker of smile, before she checked her watch. "See you there."

"Right." I headed out, trying to plot out some way to undetectably stuff a Marine's sock down Sermane's throat. Harsh, I know. Downright sadistic, even. But probably not fatal. Darn.

And small enough payback, for how bad I knew this briefing would be...

---------

I was wrong. It was worse.

Oh, not the briefing - though that was bad enough, with Sermane's not-so-sly jabs about Jolinar's memories coming in handy, _if_ we could get proper access to them. Not to mention the grim looks around the table when Jacob mentioned, just off-hand, that the Tok'ra had picked up some information that, hey, here was an address that Goa'uld didn't seem to have gone to in millennia, but one or two System Lords had recently expressed some furtive interest in, and would we mind checking it out in case there was something the Tok'ra could use?

Oh yeah. Forget risking their own rare little lives. Send the humans. There's plenty of _them._

Not that I said that. I am our diplomat, after all. And it was always possible there really were more important missions that the available Tok'ra had to take. Maybe.

But the planet itself... that was creepy.

And I mean _really_ creepy. Skin crawling on the neck creepy.

Which was gut-wrenching in and of itself, given the place was so normal.

Every probe we put through, and our own boots on the ground afterwards, said that P3X-459, as the SGC had designated it, was just an empty, quiet, pine-tree-laden wilderness of a planet. Only three things stood out: traces of naquadah in the ground, a bent magnetic field that Sam said was probably due to a millennia-old meteorite strike, and no sign of recent Goa'uld - or human - activity.

Weird. Very, very weird.

Heart in my throat, my team behind me, I headed past the carved diorite keep-away obelisks for the vaguely Mesopotamian ruins, wondering what I'd find.

Which was... more nothing.

An awful lot of nothing, in fact. No bones, no left-behind little treasures; barely a few cracked pots and signs of old burials. Plenty of writing around; a purely _amazing_ amount of writing, compared to a lot of planets we'd visited. Somehow these people had avoided the usual System Lord prohibition on extensive reading and writing, judging by the sheer number of baked clay tablets in evidence on various house shelves. Not to mention the same kind of writing carved into various shaped rocks, or even river-worn pebbles, by a type of very sharp tool I didn't recognize. Strange. I recorded all of it. Especially the rocks.

The kind of writing itself was just about unique, considering everything I'd run into off-world. Not hieroglyphs, though most people would probably take them for that at first glance. Instead, it was an incredibly ancient, or maybe evolved, variant of Hieroglyphic _Hittite._ Or more accurately, Hieroglyphic Luwian.

I traced the ox-turning rows of one cracked, sooty bit of baked clay with a finger, left to right, then right to left. It'd been left in a hearth, and from the way it had fragmented I kind of got the impression it'd been _thrown_ in out of sheer frustration. _How did you get here?_ I wondered. _I've never seen you off-world before-_

I stared at the last few lines, looking at symbols completely unlike everything else: squared-off, blocky, and dominated by right angles.

_Ancient. My gods, it's Ancient._

Ancient characters, one at a time, with bits of Luwian under each. They didn't seem to make viable words-

I sounded them out in my head, the Luwian I vaguely remembered with the bits of Ancient I'd picked up from Jack and our brief jaunt to Ernest's planet and other places, and nearly choked. No, it didn't make words. It wasn't even wholly accurate, which might throw the whole idea off, but so many bits of it were so _close-_

_Someone was trying to build a transcription!_

I'm not sure exactly what I said to Jack; only that the entire hearth was _important,_ and yes, I needed every last little bit of clay in it.

The end result was more like salvage archaeology than the neat job I wished I could have done... but we were leaving lots of other areas for that, later. This - this was important. Now.

I sealed the last bits into our sample containers, along with one of those odd little carved rocks, and sighed. I _still_ hadn't found any sign of catastrophe. Nothing but the kind of orderly discarding of unwanted items that marked an organized migration, as if everyone who'd lived here had suddenly decided to leave, two or three hundred years ago.

Nothing but a really, really bad feeling.

Or... absence of feeling.

Chilled, I straightened as Sam sent the UAV off east - my best guess as to where the locals might have gone. That was it. I'd been handling artifacts, building stones, and trail markers all day - and I'd felt _nothing_.

I couldn't even feel my own team.

_Ki sense. Something here is blocking ki sense-_

Which was when Jack went down like a bag of anvils.

---------------

_Jack_

Swallowing as the infirmary ceiling did a kind of gray-tiled rumba, I let my head _thunk_ back against the pillow. "This sucks."

Ensconced in SG-1's very own visitor chair, my very own goose-bumped archaeologist pushed his glasses up. "I know, Jack."

I glared at the glucose IV tapped into the back of my hand, the Jaffa standing silent and vaguely amused across the room, and the blonde and red heads bent over my medical charts with much medical-ese and waving of hands. And snorted. "This _majorly_ sucks."

"Taking my rank in vain, sir?" Carter fitted the healing device over her hand, and braced herself. "We've tried everything else. Let's see if this helps."

Orange light played across me, and I paled, swallowing as my gut took up a samba counterpoint to the ceiling's dance-a-thon. "Carter - not good-"

Daniel shoved the wastebasket under my head just in time.

Wiping my mouth with a shaky hand, I just let my head hang there a minute. "_God_, this sucks."

"Huh." Frowning, Sam raised the healing device again.

"Major!" Janet said sharply.

"I'm just going to do a scan, Janet," Carter stated. "I'm not going to try to fix anything."

The doc frowned.

"Your call, Doc," I croaked. Which was clue number one I was in no shape to argue. Ugh.

"If he gets any worse, turn it off," Janet said bluntly. Yep, Major Doctor Fraiser is in the building.

"Right." The orange light shone again, quieter this time.

_Don't throw up_, I chanted silently. _Don't throw up... at least not until she's finished, and Teal'c can zat you out of your misery..._

The orange light switched off. I let out a slow breath, feeling way, way better. Which still left me feeling like something Siler had scraped off the inside of the iris, but hey. You take what you can get.

"It's not an infection," Sam said, surprised. "Not a toxin, not nanoprobes - there's nothing there that shouldn't be." She played the healing device over herself, then Daniel and Teal'c. "As far as I can tell, we're just as okay as we were before we went to P3X-459."

Great. "Daniel?"

"Jack?"

"Next time the Tok'ra come up with a good idea, let's toss 'em there."

A flicker of a grin vibrated in his voice. "Wouldn't be fair to the natives."

I cracked an eye open. "From which I'm guessing there are natives?"

"Of a most unusual size and demeanor, O'Neill," Teal'c recounted. "One appears to have... used the UAV as a chew-toy."

I gave him a look.

"Big, white, flying snake-dog sort of thing," Daniel said neutrally. "It kind of grinned at the remote. Before it started munching."

I gave them both a look. "How big?"

Teal'c looked even more inscrutable than usual. "Difficult to determine."

"But the video enhancement guys are guessing... fifteen, twenty feet," Daniel admitted.

_"Flying?" _

"Er... yeah."

One of these days, I'm going to find out who in charge of the universe hates my life. "Okay. So, assuming I haven't got the universe's biggest case of dog dander sniffles-"

"It's definitely not an allergen, sir," Carter said seriously. "I can pick up a few of those in Daniel's system, and the antihistamines he's taking to knock them out. There's - nothing."

"Nothing?" Janet groused. "_Nothing_ doesn't knock out a perfectly healthy colonel two hours into an away mission."

She sounded personally offended. No surprise. If Janet says you're healthy, you're healthy - and any bugs that didn't get the word better run screaming for their germy little lives.

"Well..." Sam hesitated. "There is _something._ It's just, I don't know if it means anything, it really shouldn't..."

"Spit it out, Major," I growled.

"It's your blood, sir," she sighed. "Some of it feels... I don't know. Odd."

"Run another blood test," Janet muttered, moving in with sharp, bright and shiny.

"Not sure what you're going to find, Doc," I grumbled as the needle slid home. Chekov had it right. All doctors are vampires. I flexed a no-longer-sore shoulder, thinking of another time under the healing device less than a week ago, along with bags of blood and Dr. Warner's nimble surgeon's hands. "Half of it's not mine right now anyway."

"Two units is a lot less than half, Colonel. But good point," the doc noted, storing her sample. "Let me call Warner. You may have picked up something entirely Earth-native, for once. Blood from someone with undiagnosed sickle-cell, maybe. Or maybe just a usually innocuous virus that doesn't like the alien versions of pollen in your system. Who knows." Dialing, she frowned. "Besides, I've been meaning to talk to him anyway. I put a sample in storage, and now I can't find... Bill? Oh good. Look, can you send me the ID numbers on the units you used for the colonel's last surgery? No, I don't think there was anything wrong, he's still in the infirmary growling at me... should be up? Thanks. Just let me take a look..." Phone still in hand, she tapped away on her keyboard. "Good, I've got them-" Her fingers stopped tapping.

I glanced at Daniel. _Trouble?_

The archaeologist glanced at Janet, shrugged his shoulders slightly. Inclined his head.

"Bill." Janet's tone dropped a few degrees as she read off an ID number. "What was that doing in the... Yes, I _know_ we were short of AB negative, we're always short of it, what does that- No, I was not saving that aside for Jack! There's... It's a long story, Bill, save us both a lot of grief and don't ask. No. The blood wasn't contaminated. Just - let me straighten this out." Face grim, she hung up. And banged her head on the desk. Twice.

"Doc?" I asked dryly.

"It doesn't matter how small," Janet sighed. "Breaches of medical ethics _always_ come back to bite you."

Daniel stiffened. "Janet?"

"Blood donation is usually anonymous." Her voice was still muffled by the desk, but we all had a lot of practice making out Doc-under-stress. "I pulled a few strings and got that particular unit from a specific donor in the Carson Springs area. I meant to take a good look at it in the lab, since we haven't been able to get said donor into the SGC infirmary and he's one bundle of questions we want answered." Her shoulders slumped. "Warner got to it first."

Teal'c raised a brow.

Janet lifted her head. "Guess what local _ib-seshatai_ is AB negative?"

Carter stared. Daniel muffled a groan. Teal'c nodded once, not surprised.

I fixed the doc with a glare. "You've _got_ to be kidding."

---------------

_Megumi_

You know you're having a bad day when it starts with a heads-up call about a wandering, depressed, and probably anemic _dhampire_, and ends with throwing a military surgeon and his escorting MPs out of your clinic.

_"And stay out!" _

Times like this, I'm glade Kaoru insists I keep a bokken behind the counter. The young men and women in uniform muttered a few polite apologies, then moved off to the edge of the Ihara Clinic driveway with their sputtering charge. They just didn't go any further.

At least they had the decency to look sheepish about it.

At the moment, I didn't really care. I was all but shaking with rage... and fear.

_They know. Somehow, they know. _

_What_ they knew, I wasn't sure of yet. But the questions this Warner had asked, the information he wanted-

_If they find out about Kenshin, they can find out about any of us._

_My children..._

My fingers did the walking while my brain was still gibbering in panic; I almost missed Kaoru's cheery, "Kamiya Kasshin dojo!"

"Grab Rei," I said numbly. "Find my idiot of a husband. Find _your_ idiot of a husband. Call everyone else, and be ready to pull a Shinomori."

As in, _drop everything and vanish._

We've done it before, most notably when everyone official thought Kenshin was dying. He almost had died, the idiot; but once his own stubborn hanyou blood kicked off the death-curse and woke up, it woke up _cranky._ All things considered, it's just as well we had a bunch of Chinese villains to handle. I don't know what would have happened if we'd been forced to face down Meiji's troops.

Actually, I do know what would have happened. The scared bunch of idiots around our Emperor would have gotten stark proof of just what a half-demon hitokiri can do when his own family is at stake. Suddenly and violently and all over the place.

But that was then, and this was now, and I really, _really_ didn't want to find out the hard way what these people would do if they realized they damn well _ought_ to be scared of Kenshin. Visions of air-strikes were dancing through my head-

"-Megumi-dono!"

"Kenshin." I shivered, clutching the phone. "We're in trouble."

"What did they say?"

I swallowed dryly. "That one of their patients was sick, and they traced the donor number..."

I didn't have to say any more. For either of us.

Ever since the Red Cross started up, we've been careful. Most of our little clan doesn't donate at all, unless it's to family; hanyou blood carries its own magical charge, and though we _can_ take precautions to make sure it doesn't drag some unsuspecting patient into the clan, it's just easier not to bother. Kenshin, bless his too-generous heart, does donate; we figured out a long time ago how to keep the _kiryuu_ elements inactive, AB negative is rare, and if a recipient heals just a little faster than normal for a month or two, most doctors are glad to take the credit. But even under those circumstances, we're careful. Kenshin only gives blood once or twice a year, and we make sure it goes right to a local hospital. It never goes near the military. Ever.

For it to be in one of the people under the mountain, _and_ for them to be sick...

Kenshin doesn't _get_ sick. Not the way humans do. He can be injured, certainly; he can go too long without blood and hunting, and slide into magical starvation that starts out looking like low blood sugar and ends up looking like a degenerative illness from the lower hells. But he does not. Get. Sick.

"Megumi-dono. Breathe."

Good idea. Oh gods, my patients, my family - this wasn't fair, it just wasn't _fair-_

"So," an unfamiliar man's voice carried from the front desk. "Pentagon decide to outsource a few more things I haven't heard of, or do the local airmen just like your fortune cookies?"

And Kenshin laughed.

"Ken-san?" I muttered.

"Ask him for help, Megumi-dono." I could hear Kenshin's smile through the line. "After all, if Hannibal-san has done _you_ a favor, he may be willing to accept one in return. And that would ease Ryan's mind considerably."

---------------

_Hannibal_

Okay, since when did I walk into World War III?

Not that anybody's shooting. Not yet. But there's military types outside the clinic, worried civilian types inside the clinic, and one damn scared Dr. Megumi Takani clutching a phone as if she expects to have to dial 911 in a split second. And anything that gets a fox like her worried is enough to get this PI checking for emergency exits.

I took another careful sniff, and didn't know whether to laugh or cry. Fox, definitely. Or as she'd probably put it, _kitsune_. Probably with a heap of human in the mix on top of that; everything I'd ever read says fox-spirits are a bit too flighty and powerful to want to do anything as legit as clinic work. But any way you slice it, likely at least half-_youkai_.

Figured. Detective O'Connell had given me her card, after all. And if you had wolf-demon in your background, would _you_ go to a human doc? "What's up, Doc?"

If looks could kill, I'd have been a seared spot on the carpet.

I put up my hands to ward off that incendiary brown glare, gave her a shrug. "Sorry, it's been a bad week..." I took a step back from the worried blonde medical receptionist with the nametag of "Letitia" and slanted a serious look Dr. Takani's way. "They got a warrant?"

"Ha!" Long, delicate fingers clenched and unclenched, as if clutching a certain Air Force guy's throat. "They don't think they _need_ one."

I _tch_ed. "Downright rude." Man, I would not want to be in that guy's shoes. That whole line about woman scorned? Double for fox-women. They can get downright _creative._

But then again - she was a doc. Meaning she probably wanted to at least _try_ to solve this without use of foxfire. I glanced at her phone. "You could get 'em hauled off for trespassing."

Other people might have mistaken Takani's flash of white teeth for a smile. "That could be difficult."

"Oh yeah?"

"They work under the mountain," Letitia put in, fake pink nails worrying at her paperwork. "Things kind of get... smoothed over."

I added two and two, and came up with _aw, hell_. Military guys with an unofficial license to break laws, trying to raid the records of a woman who seemed to be some kind of local doctor for those of us who go ka-thump, crash, ow, in the night? No way this could end well.

I don't like the supernatural. I'd be human in a heartbeat if I could. I didn't _ask_ to be a damn bloodsucker.

But damn it all, I'm _not_ Blade. I'm not gonna assume that everybody on the wrong side of the night is there by choice. Maybe they're good people, maybe they're not - but until I had evidence something was deliberately out to do harm, no matter how ugly it looked, I had to at least give it a shot at trying to be humane.

I took a look at the fading light out there, and breathed a little sigh of relief. At least it was almost sundown. Made things a lot easier to deal with. "Make you a deal. You tell me what he wants to know, an' what you think he should know, I'll go tell him to park himself somewhere that don't freeze over."

A black brow went up. "In return for?"

I faked a casual shrug. "You up for giving somebody just passing through a checkup?"

Takani smiled.

A couple minutes filling out paperwork, and I headed out to where Doc Bozo - ahem, Warner - was gesticulating on some kind of encrypted cell phone. Subtle, this guy wasn't. "Evening."

A few inches shorter than me, a little jowly and balding, frazzled, and obviously out of his league. I almost felt sorry for the guy. "And you are?" he snapped.

Yep, almost. "I'm the guy that's gonna save your sorry behind," I smirked back. "Unless you want the AMA to hear how you tried to get a fellow doctor to breach medical ethics? No? I didn't think so." I bundled my hands in my trenchcoat pockets, keeping the recognition off my face as I watched the kids in uniform tense up. Huh. How did people stationed under a mountain come up with firefight twitches? "Just as a friendly reminder, we got a little thing called doctor-patient confidentiality in this country. Dr. Takani's not just in her rights to tell you no, she's obligated to tell you _hell_ no." I took out a finger to wave it when he tried to talk. "Now, just as a favor from one doc to another - and bear in mind this is a _favor_ - she asked me to let you know she does run blood tests on her patients, and she advises anybody who shouldn't donate blood not to. We clear?"

"The circumstances are unusual," Warner blustered. "Mr. Himura's medical history may be crucial-"

Mr. Himura's _official_ medical history probably was as plain-vanilla as Takani could make it. Assuming Mr. Himura was the guy Warner was indeed looking for; Takani had hedged with "my patient" and "the donor", but she for damn sure hadn't mentioned a name. Sheesh, and I didn't think my opinion of this guy could drop any lower. "You try _asking_ Dr. Takani about these unusual circumstances?"

By the shift of his eyes, I could tell he hadn't.

"I'm going to give you some free legal advice, Dr. Warner. Get out of here," I jabbed a thumb toward the uniforms, "and take them with you."

"Just who do you think you _are?_"

The hell with this. I stood straight as that night years ago when I'd faced down the most fearsome vampire hunter on the planet, and let just a wisp of that oncoming darkness flow free. "The name's King," I stated. "Hannibal King."

---------------

_Sam_

"Warner did what, Sir?" I said in disbelief. I could have misheard, after all; Janet and I had been up to our ears in lab work, getting our brand-new exo-biology geeks up to speed hitting the colonel's blood samples with PCR, ELISA, and the whole rest of the alphabet. We'd poked and prodded at it with microscopes, centrifuges, energy fields, the healing device, and no few bits of other scavenged tech. If the kitchen sink would have helped, we'd have hit it with that, too.

"I would have thought you'd be more concerned with what he didn't do, Major." General Hammond frowned, keeping a reasonable distance from the colonel as we stood near the infirmary doors; just because we were fairly certain the cause was Earth-native, didn't mean we were _sure_. "I suspect I'll have to add Dr. Warner to Dr. Baird's treatment list; no one Earth-based should shake one of our people so badly. We'll just have to send someone else back there for Himura's records-"

"Sir, no," I said firmly.

"_Excuse_ me, Major?"

"It's _illegal,_ Sir," I stated, trying not to shake inside. "Even if it weren't - we do not need the kind of attention the NID already drew down on themselves." Live and let live only goes so far, after all. Inside that nice quiet kendo instructor is a guy who had absolutely no qualms about filleting a car with agents still in it. An otherwise smart guy who nonetheless seems to delight in going _nyah_ at the NID at every opportunity. And worse, doing so in what the colonel suspects is a Plan.

I did ask the colonel what _kind_ of plan. Once. Jack grumbled something about the NID eventually getting Himura right where he wanted them, and wouldn't say anything else. I didn't push it. Officially, I'm a member of the armed forces, sworn to preserve and protect all American lives. Unofficially - well, if an innocent civilian within the bounds of the United States in reasonable fear for his own life decides to use deadly force, that's a matter for local law enforcement. Not me.

Janet added another slip of paper to the unruly pile on her clipboard. One of which was probably a note to check on Warner, now lightly sedated in his own on-base quarters with some very impressed airmen keeping an eye on him. As one of the guys had chuckled in passing, he hadn't seen anybody stared down _that_ bad since the last time a grizzled staff sergeant lost his temper over a couple of green recruits, a slingshot, and a live grenade. "I doubt there would be any point, General. Regular medical tests wouldn't catch this." She waved us in toward our worried archaeologist, grumpy colonel, and intrigued Jaffa. "I don't know yet if the problem is alien, Sir, but it's definitely native. Or should I say, it definitely originated from this planet."

"Janet?" Daniel asked.

"Your statements would seem contradictory, Dr. Fraiser," Teal'c noted.

"Simplify, and explain," O'Neill ordered.

A fey grin crossed Janet's face. "You have a nasty case of cellular mimics, Colonel."

"...A little less simple," Jack muttered.

I nodded, wide-eyed. Granted, biology wasn't my field, but to put together the various tests we'd done and come up with _that-_ whoa. Wait a minute...

I blinked, seeing Daniel's fingers waving in front of my face. "Earth to Sam?"

_Damn, lost it._ "Janet?"

"One thing I've learned working here," Janet observed. "Sometimes you have to treat the symptoms you find, even if what you think should _cause_ those symptoms isn't there. In this case - immersion in frigid water."

_She kept him warm, gave him IV glucose, tried to make sure his electrolytes were stable-_ "Hypothermia?" I blurted. "Cold-water drowning?"

"Deliberately instigated, I think," Janet nodded. "At least, insofar as biochemical prodding can be deliberate."

"I didn't even go near the water, Doc," the colonel pointed out.

"No," Janet agreed. "But outside of getting wet, the mimics seem to have caused a systemic reaction similar to that I'd see if somebody dumped you off an Antarctic icebreaker."

"...Ow."

"Definitely ow," Janet nodded. But I could tell her heart wasn't in it; it was too darn fascinating. How on earth cells _inside_ the organism had provoked a reaction that should have only been caused by external conditions...

"There is a difference from drowning in warm water, Dr. Fraiser?" Teal'c asked, intrigued.

"For humans, a big one." Janet tapped her fingers on her clipboard. "I'll show you some of the technical details later, Teal'c. For now - if a human goes under in warm water, oxygen starvation sets in, and the brain dies. But if they go under in _cold_ water, the whole system slows down, what blood flow there is gets diverted to the brain and internal organs, and there is a chance - not a good chance, but a chance - they can be revived with little or no trauma." She gave the colonel a level look. "Believe it or not, Colonel, you weren't the only casualty on this mission."

"But... I was just a little chilly," Daniel protested.

"Yes, you were," Janet acknowledged. "When both Teal'c and Sam didn't feel a thing. You were _cold,_ Daniel - and I don't think external temperature had anything to do with it. I think your body knew it was in trouble, and was deliberately conserving energy. In essence, it was pulling off a controlled shutdown." She gave Colonel O'Neill a jaundiced look. "As opposed to an _un_controlled shutdown."

"You're saying the same thing that KO'd me just gave Daniel the shivers?" Jack arched a skeptical brow.

"I'm saying it KO'd you because you didn't _have_ the shivers, Colonel." Janet held up a hand when the general would have jumped in. "Let me take this from the top, Sir. Some of it's based on the work of our new lab team, some of it's educated guesswork. But hopefully, it's testable. The UAV was able to tell us the distortion in the magnetic field had a measurable endpoint, less than half a mile away from where that creature munched it; I predict that if we send another, specially-equipped probe to the planet, we'll find that distortion has similar, yet more extreme, characteristics to that produced by an MRI. I further predict that any SGC personnel we send through that don't have adverse reactions to the MRI scans, won't suffer ill effects. At least, not in the short term."

"Major?" The general looked at me.

"That would follow," I nodded, thinking hard. "Hypothermia induced by lack of compatible energies?"

"With hypoglycemia following as the dependent cells got desperate for alternative sources of fuel," Janet agreed. "I even found some traces of ketosis as they broke into the colonel's fat stores. Determined little buggers."

Eyes were bouncing back and forth between us like first-time spectators at a tennis match. "Carter?" the colonel asked dryly.

"In a cellular sense?" I shrugged. "You got mugged, Sir."

"More like, they made you an offer you couldn't refuse," Janet said in perfect Godfather tones. "After all, all they were trying to do was survive. And their normal host system probably would've beat feet out of there even before Daniel did."

"Himura," the general stated.

"Is, by his own admission, even more sensitive to magnetic and so-called psychokinetic energy flows than Daniel, Sir. Apparently, to the cellular level." Janet pointed to one of her sample vials, where foil protected tender cells from light. "We were able to separate out donor cells from Colonel O'Neill's own blood cells by exposing a sample to a strong magnetic field. Regular blood cells don't care. Himura's, red, white, or otherwise, bolt for cover. To the point they _crawl_ if they have to." She listened to our blank silence, and stifled a sigh. "Red blood cells are not supposed to act like amoebas, General. Trust me."

"Not to knock the science, Janet, but how can you be sure that's because they're Kenshin's, and not just something weird about Jack?" Daniel pointed out.

"Hey!"

"After the kinds of extraterrestrial chemicals and other weirdness we've run into?" Daniel gave him a pointed look.

"All right, all right..."

Janet grinned dryly. "Because human RBCs don't have nuclei, either."

Teal'c raised a brow.

"Humans and Jaffa have that in common," Janet said plainly. "Our mature red blood cells lose a lot of cellular machinery. We're always making new ones and recycling them, after all; there's no point in expending energy that could be used for the cell to just carry oxygen around. So mammals just don't. But not every vertebrate feels that way. Birds, reptiles, fish - they all have nucleated RBCs. And so does Kenshin." She hesitated. "Though I suspect that could also be because they're not exactly red blood cells. Only suspect, granted; if they're not, they're pulling off a damn good imitation. Good enough to fool anybody, even under a microscope, without high magnetics involved. But-" Her lab computer chimed. She held up a hand: _wait._

I snooped over her shoulder, my jaw dropping as the exo-biology results came back. If this was solid, we owed the new guys a round of pizza.

Then again, if this was solid, I was going to be checking and re-checking our computer systems until my eyes dried out to make sure we'd destroyed all the snoops. No way could we let the NID get their hands on this.

"Forget suspect," Janet said colorlessly. "Those are not red blood cells." She gave the colonel a sober look. "Not human ones."

---------------

_Daniel_

Kenshin isn't human.

Kenshin... isn't _human._

So what does that make me?

I was frozen in my chair as Sam and Janet tossed medical-ese back and forth, ears twitching at a few of the Latinate terms, automatically comparing them to their counterparts in Ancient; one or two of which had shown up on those rescued clay fragments. Ancient medical-ese... scary thought. If someone had been trying to transcribe Ancient into their own language, and I had the distinct impression they had, why would they start with words like that? It'd be like trying to learn how to write English from one of Sam's lab manuals. Crazy.

Focus. Kenshin. Not human... but he _acts_ human... but he's over a century and a half old... but...

"Alien cellular mimics?" Jack asked pointedly. "Doc. If the Thing from Outer Space is alive and well and pretending to be a kendo instructor in Carson Springs while he donates blood to make more Things, I'm going to be _very cranky_."

"I don't have anything to indicate these cells are infectious, or even reproducing," Janet said soberly. "Which is actually odd, the white blood cells should divide a few times if we give them a proper media. Only they haven't. The cellular machinery's there, it's just not inducing division. They're performing the right bloodstream functions. Otherwise, they're inert." She sighed. "Unfortunately, I can't swear they'll stay that way. Right now our new bio geeks are having tremendous fun watching some red blood cells turn into white blood cells, and vice-versa."

"Say _what?_"

"Started happening when they fractionated a sample to try a DNA analysis," Janet shrugged. "After all, ordinarily we'd need white blood cells for that. But Robertson took a look at his vial of RBCs after they started the first run, and voila: white blood cells in the mix. Back to regular blood again."

"Cells don't just turn into other cells," Sam objected.

"Technically, stem cells do just that," Janet corrected her. "But if the protein analyses are right, they aren't just turning into other cells. They're turning into cells that _look_ like Colonel O'Neill's. Down to the antigen coat. Only the DNA is different. _Very_ different." She frowned. "The antigens are actually a hopeful sign; his spleen might just be able to clear these cells out in a month or two. Assuming they let it - we're going to have to see if they react to biochemical lysis differently from energy starvation..."

Shape-shifting cells, no less. Gods, it's like something out of a fairytale-

_"Hengeyokai."_

"Daniel?" Jack gave me a sidelong look.

Oops. Did I say that out loud?

Deep breath. They're already suspecting the worst, after all.

But how are they going to take it when I tell them Kenshin's not an alien?

Only one way to find out. "Hengeyokai. The Changing Phantoms. That's the Japanese term for them, but we find them in legends all over the world, just like the legends of gods..."

Blank looks. Backtrack, Daniel. "Battousai was called the _youkai_ of Kyoto. Demon. Phantom. Supernatural creature. The same... _type_ of creature as other shape-shifters, even if legend didn't say _he_ shifted shape."

"Shape-shifters?" Sam gave me a you've-_got_-to-be-kidding look. "Like werewolves?"

"Totally different." I shook my head. "Werewolves are humans who change into something else. Hengeyokai... well, they're a _something else_ that turns into a human. Foxes and _tanuki_ are the common ones, but youkai could be any kind of natural force. Animals, rivers, storms, dragons... actually, dragons and rivers are kind of interchangeable, though there's also supposed to be wind and fire dragons..."

Dead silence.

"Fine. You know what? Forget it. I told people about cross-pollination of cultures and that the pyramids were built way before we thought they were, and no one wanted to believe me until they could tie it in to something they knew had to have been built by aliens. Nobody modern, anyway - ancient people _knew_ the gods did it. And guess what? Ancient people also had this silly idea that there were creatures on earth that didn't _have_ fixed forms; that they could be humans if they wanted, or animals if they wanted, or something else in-between. Not only that, but that some of these creatures _loved_ humans; loved them enough to have children with them. And that for generations afterward, these children would be special. _Different._" I was shaking, I was so mad. Gods, why was I so mad?

Because - I was still cold. Inside. And yet everything was so clear. Like going for hours with ear protectors on, then suddenly taking them off; the least little sound ached like thunder. I could _feel_ what was happening here, how the general and Jack and anyone else down the chain of command would look at this and see _threat_.

"If you think Kenshin's not human - if you think he did this on _purpose,_ that he's _dangerous_ - then you might as well put me in Area 51 right with him." I stared at the general, trying to will my hands not to shake. "Because whatever his DNA says, whatever makes him _different_ - Janet's going to find it in me, too."

"Danny-"

"No, Jack, I'm not _sure,_" I headed his question off at the pass. "But I'd bet on it. I would."

"Odds are he's right, General," Janet observed neutrally. "Similar sensory capability would tend to indicate similar biological systems behind it."

"For your sake, I hope not, Dr. Jackson," Hammond frowned. "Damage control, Doctor. Is there any way to get these cells out of Colonel O'Neill?"

"Actually, I think so," Janet nodded. "It won't be pleasant, but if we can combine blood filtration with some magnetic fiddling, we should be able to sieve the little buggers out. Though I would suggest a few units of whole blood on hand to replace what we're going to be taking out; the colonel's had enough system shocks for one day."

"Shock or not, Doctor, you'll have to start on that ASAP," he ordered. "I cannot allow my second in command to be compromised by alien influence-"

_"Kenshin is not an alien."_

Conversation lurched to a halt. "Daniel Jackson?" Teal'c ventured.

"He lives here," I managed, through a throat tight with... something I didn't want to look at too closely. "He has a family. Children. Friends. He holds down a job. He lets the cops take him in for vandalism when he cuts down a light-pole. He has a goddamn Social Security Number!"

"_Illegal_ Social Security Number," Jack pointed out. "So he's got a good cover. So what?" He jabbed a thumb toward Janet's damning computer screen. "Doesn't change what he is."

"Yeah," I said softly. "I guess not."

And walked out.

Because if I didn't, I-

I didn't know what I'd do. I was just so angry, so cold, so...

A hand appeared in my line of sight, just long enough to get me to glance down to a certain ex-Toronto dweller's startled brown gaze. "Dr. Jackson?" Dr. Enomouto looked me up and down, shook his head. "You look _terrible._"

A bitter _ha_ escaped my lips. "D-doesn't surprise me." Damn. Stuttering. I hate it when that happens, hate it...

"Can you talk about it?" Behind glass, brown eyes narrowed, worried. "I haven't been here long enough to really get into the local informal informational networks-"

Ah, yes; the rumor mill. Gods, I'd missed having someone around who knew anthropological jargon.

"-But I've heard some of the organizational support personnel saying SG-1 ran into some real trouble off-world, and some of the subordinate-status tribal warriors are also saying Warner got sent after something on-world here, and it seems to me like there's a communal consensus that it would not be overreacting to be worried that something got loose from the base..."

A lift of his brow said _worried_ was an understatement.

Gossip. Faster than 'Gate travel. And possibly more deadly. "Nothing got loose," I said firmly. "Janet just wanted some information that I don't think we're going to find in medical journals." I passed the elevator and headed for the stairs, hoping to burn off some of the frustration. "We did find a little... well, writing on the walls. I was thinking of seeing what you made of it."

Enomouto shrugged as we made our way up a few floors toward my office. "Hittite, right? My Egyptian hieroglyphs are okay, Dr. Jackson, but my cuneiform? Not so good."

I stopped dead.

A few steps below me, Benkai slapped a hand to his forehead. _"Kuso."_

"How did you know?" I said levelly. Because he _shouldn't_ know. There was no way anyone who knew we'd found Mesopotamian-style ruins - meaning the general, Janet, and the 'Gateroom personnel, anybody else should only know SG-1 came home in pieces, _again_ - would have talked to a new scientist. Details on off-world missions don't get spread around until after we make our official report. Especially details on places we're checking out because the Tok'ra asked us to take a look.

Suspicious of our allies? Who, us?

And if they _had_ talked, they would have looked at the tablet pics we sent back, and said hieroglyphs. I've done my best, but the fine distinctions of the variety of different ancient writing systems are pretty much lost on most people here. They're doing better than the average guy on the street just to recognize that hieroglyphs, cuneiform, and runes are all different systems. Try telling them there's a purely Proto-Indo-European system of hieroglyphs out there, for a kingdom we still haven't be able to pin down geographically besides "somewhere on the edge of the Hittite Empire", and I'm sure I'd get a resounding, "Say _what?_"

Benkai wouldn't meet my eyes. No - he was looking at my hands. "What's your style?"

"Kamiya Kasshin, and whatever Colonel O'Neill comes up with for SGC hand-to-hand," I said neutrally. "And you?"

"I thought you looked like one of Kaoru's!" The grin lit up a plain face; turned it warm, almost handsome. "Well, if you've been there a few months, you know part of her training is meditation? Sometimes even-" he hesitated, almost unnoticeably, "-hunches?"

I lifted a skeptical brow. How did he jump from Kamiya Kasshin, straight to Kaoru? There's got to be other masters of the style. Doesn't there? "You had a hunch?"

Dark eyes rolled. "If I had a nickel for every time somebody brought up the whole 'disturbance in the Force' line... Spooky Benkai, that's me. Ask anybody in the anthro department back at U of T. Which is kind of why I was a little surprised at the job offer; I never put anything in a paper we can't back up with hard evidence, but..."

"We have a little experience here, running with hunches," I said dryly. Though to be honest, it's usually only SG-1's hunches that get official attention. I don't know whether to be grateful General Hammond trusts us that much, or frustrated that he might be ignoring perfectly valid lines of inquiry just because they don't come from his flagship team.

Though at the moment, I was working on a very fine-slivered case of mad. I knew it. I _knew_ our new help was too good to be true.

Not that I thought Benkai was a plant. Oh no. The NID, or whoever was behind this particular yank on our chain, was too clever for that.

I'm the head archaeologist and anthropologist on this base. I'm one of the people who got final review over Benkai's records. And there was not one hint, not _one,_ in anything I saw, that he was anything but a more flexible than average anthro-linguist.

Made me wonder what Janet's exo-bio geeks had in their background.

Whatever it was, I was betting it was something like Benkai's little... lapses of professional sanity. Some smoky taint on their skills or reputation that would let whoever's making decisions upstairs point to their conclusions and say, _well, that_ might _be right... but these scientists, they're a little, you know..._

Which would be all the more reason to turn over the SGC to people a little more... conventional. A little more... in touch with the party line.

I'm not a violent person. Really. But I had a sudden, sharp impulse to hunt up a couple of NID agents and introduce them to practical archaeology. Such as, say, _exactly_ how you perform the execution the ancient Norse knew as the blood eagle.

It's a particularly nasty way to die, and from everything I can determine, Gairwyn's people still practice it on oath-breakers. Which tells me more than I want to know about the Asgaard.

Am I grateful to the Asgaard for protecting Earth? Oh yes. As far as that goes - which is not too far, given the conditions of the Protected Planets Treaty say Earth is a glowing ball of rock any time the System Lords decide our technology's advanced to a level to be a threat to them. Note that clause: _they_ decide. No input from us, none from the Asgaard, just a majority of powerful Goa'uld coming to the conclusion that we're too advanced to fulfill our "rightful" position of hosts - or slaves.

Do I _trust_ the Asgaard? Not as far as I could throw ten of Thor put together.

Not because I deliberately think they'd betray us. Not exactly. But I don't think they understand us. What's worse, I think they _think_ they understand us - when that whole Hall of Thor's Might mess shows they _don't_.

I doubt Sam has thought about it. I know I didn't at the time; I was just grateful we were still in one piece, Heru'ur's forces were getting their snaky tails yanked off the planet, and the Asgaard were going to fix what we'd broken. Not that that would return the lives the Cimmerians had lost, but at least nobody else was going to die because we screwed up.

But later... later I thought about it. A lot. Old Norse runes as code for pi? Relying on number meanings over a thousand years old? When the whole Futhark system changed at least half a dozen times on Earth as we know it before it was pretty much dropped in favor of Romanized lettering? And that doesn't even take into account the human tendency to stray from base-ten counting every once in a while, into base-eight or base-twelve or even base-sixteen. All of which would give a different series of numbers for the ratio of a circle's circumference to its radius.

If the Asgaard thought the Cimmerians would keep that much of their written language and number systems static that long, they didn't know humans at all.

And... whatever hunches Benkai might get about anthropology, he looked like he was getting a nerve-wracking one about me. "It's just, I've been around artifacts from that area before," he shrugged, trying to put a few more inches between us. "They feel different from Egypt. Kind of... bloodier."

"I'm not holding any artifacts," I said flatly. Let him sweat that a second. "But I was there. In someplace that had spiritually potent and potentially maleficent invocations to local powers as keep-away signs."

Or as laymen would put it, curses.

"Oh." Benkai swallowed dryly. "Well..."

"And you knew it."

"Um..."

"And I'm not throwing you out of the SGC here and now for being completely unscientific _why?_"

He straightened to his full five-foot-five-and-zip, all the puppy-charm set aside. "Because if you know Kaoru, you know Kenshin," Benkai said frankly. "And if you know Kenshin, you _know_ there are things out there current science doesn't have a handle on."

"Yeah, well, you can tell the hengeyokai current science just caught up with him," I muttered.

Benkai paled. "How? He's _careful,_ damn it - he doesn't go near weirdoes in labcoats-"

I felt a little faint myself. "He... really _is_ hengeyokai?"

"Um - no?"

I dropped down a few steps, and gave my sweating subordinate a level look. "Dr. Enomouto... you and I need to talk."

---------------

_Benkai_

I swear, Kenshin can attract more trouble than a barrel-full of snow monkeys.

"This-" _clack_ "just-" _clatter_ "-arrgh!"

Parry, parry, twist, dodge. Let him work out the mad - and boy, does this young man have a lot of mad to work out.

Bokken in hand, I took a quick glance toward the rest of the base gym, relieved nobody else seemed to be interested in this corner of it at the moment. Not that there were too many people here at this hour, outside of a few technical types tearing up imaginary roads on exercise bikes and one glowering Marine with an arm cast doing routines at the weights. But I'd found out a long time ago it only took one person suspicious of exactly how you managed a tricky move to make life very uncomfortable.

Only from the sound of what Dr. Jackson had let slip, somebody had found a way to pick hanyou out of the crowd without even having to see them.

Nightmare. It's a _kami_-damn-it _nightmare._

_Breathe, and be._ Kaoru's old instructions came back like yesterday; I flowed through the paired forms like water. Okay - maybe like worried, terrified water. But I couldn't get answers if he knocked my skull in.

I could almost hear my sensei's chuckle. _That's right, Benkai. He'll tell you. In his own time._

"I mean-" _clash_ "-what am I supposed to tell them?" Dr. Jackson panted. "Oh gee, Jack, Janet, everybody - I'm sorry? Because, damn it, I'm _not_." _Smack._ "You stole a supernatural creature's gift of hospitality, abused it for your own purposes to search out and potentially exploit the donor's weaknesses, tried to break the sacred oath of a healer in the process, and then repudiated the gift?" He stepped back, hands wringing the wooden grip. "Damn it, they're all screwed!"

"Maybe," I admitted, breathing a little heavily myself. "Maybe not. What happened?" I lowered my weapon and my voice, stepping close enough that the cranky Marine couldn't hear. "How is Kenshin in trouble?" _How are we all?_

Behind glass, blue eyes closed in a wince. "Jack's AB negative."

"Colonel O'Neill is-" Erk. Oh. But- "How - how'd he even notice? Kenshin's careful..." Whoa. "Just what did those curses say?"

"Loose translation? 'The power of the stars shall desert you, and the power of earth not bear you upon it'-"

I cut him off right there with a sharp wave of hand. Dr. Jackson's ki didn't feel like he could cast a curse by accident, but I've been surprised before. "Let me guess. It went down the list of fire, water, air, night, and so on?"

"You've met them before." Blue studied me with the kind of calculation _onmitsu_ used before throwing down poisoned caltrops. "It stifled ki perception?"

"Close," I admitted. "I'm not sure, but it sounds like your typical ban-every-power-but-human ward. Nasty." Not as nasty as a straight-out purification, but plenty mean enough to put a hanyou down for the count. "I'm going to guess, and say there wasn't a lot of animal life in the area?"

"...No."

"They don't like that kind of thing either. Like having a permanent eclipse of the sun." I muttered a few of Grandma Cho's better curses under my breath. "Somebody put out one hell of an unwelcome mat." Which leads me to wonder about why. For someone to put that kind of ward up, and get it to stick through at least a couple centuries untouched - they have to have poured in one hell of a lot of energy. As in, possible _voluntary sacrifice_ amount of energy.

Two ways that usually goes down. Either you hate the enemy, hate them down to your dying breath and beyond, to the point you're willing to give everything you were or might ever be to see them suffer...

Or you love someone they mean to harm.

_Take my body for your shield; my soul for your sword. So long as my love endures, I swear I will protect you. _

_And love is eternal..._

We've never been pushed that far. With luck, we'll never _be_ pushed that far. But every adult in the clan knows how it's done.

"I've never run into hengeyokai legends off Earth."

I blinked, dragged back to the guy now lowering his sword in thought. "Huh?" Reran that last bit in my head. "Never? But - the Goa'uld took humans off of Earth-"

"They should have taken the stories, too," Daniel nodded. "But stories only last if there's some reason to keep telling them. Stories of the gods hung on, the Goa'uld were right there..."

"But youkai weren't?" That would make sense. Sort of. Youkai and hanyou, even hanyou who don't know what they are, tend to have a pretty tight grip on what is and isn't a threat in the local environment. Given what I've picked up just walking into the same base with Teal'c, a Jaffa raiding party heading in to round up slaves would blaze in ki sense of _bad things coming - run like hell_.

And from what I've picked up _meeting_ Teal'c, any youkai or hanyou that didn't run fast enough would probably have tried to slaughter that feeling of _alien_ before they could think twice. Meaning one side or the other would have ended up very dead. "But if it's a ward against hengeyokai..."

"Is it?" Daniel was almost looking through me, thoughts visibly racing. "'The power of the stars shall desert you'. And the Tok'ra won't go there..."

"They won't?" Very interesting. "But - Kenshin-"

Behind glass, blue gleamed. "I have an idea."

Why do I _not_ like the sound of that?

"I just need a little help."

_Because he sounds like Misao, that's why,_ I realized, thinking of our clan's bouncy little ninja-lady. The same one who likes to turn her daughters' suitors into _kunai_ pincushions, leap into people's arms to hug them, and can actually get stone-sober Aoshi to laugh. _Oh, I'm doomed..._

---------------

_Jack_

One unmarked tile, two unmarked tiles, three... wait. Was that a shadow, or a smudge from the last time something in here caught on fire?

I craned my head around as much as I could, trying not to hear the slow whine as Janet's improvised blood filter did its magnetic grabby thing. Noise or blood loss, I wasn't sure, but I had a headache you could use to crack the iris with. _Damn,_ this hurt.

No painkillers, either. The doc now sacked out on an infirmary cot in her office had offered; I'd turned her down. We didn't know what even aspirin might do to the little nucleated buggers. Better to run the procedure clean, and get it done with once and for all. No matter how much it hurt.

Hmm... shadow. Next tile over was smudged, though. So that made something like twenty-odd clear tiles, three stained, and a lot more to go.

Not to mention one tired, achy, cranky colonel who didn't want to think.

I was, though. Little bits of ideas bouncing around like hyperactive super-balls, set off by one particular archaeologist losing his temper big-time.

_Daniel thinks this was an accident._

I'm not trained to believe in accidents. I've survived way too many years in Black Ops and then the SGC by blatantly assuming there _are_ no accidents; that if something bad goes down, the only appropriate response is to determine the proper application of high explosives necessary to deal with the enemy that did it.

But. Daniel is our alien negotiations expert. And if I think Himura's an alien, then I have to at least consider the fact that Daniel might have a better grip on what makes him tick than I do. Which means it could _be_ an accident. Maybe. Along the lines of Jolinar taking over Sam level of accident...

No, no, that wasn't quite fair. That Tok'ra knew damn well what she was doing when she jumped an unwilling host and didn't 'fess up. And maybe she saved Sam later - but damn it, if it weren't for her, Sam wouldn't have needed saving from the Ashrak assassin in the first place.

All Himura did was donate blood. The rest of it was our screw-up.

Not that that let him off the hook, in my book. He knew he wasn't normal; you don't live as long as he has and think it's _normal._ Which means he should've known better than to give blood.

Damn it, my head was killing me. And there was this weird prickle along my arms and neck, as if... nah, that was crazy. But still... "Who's there?"

"Damn," grumbled from the other side of the privacy curtain. "Dr. Jackson told me to be sneaky..."

I raised one intrigued brow, wondering just where Daniel had taken off after that little blow-up. "Enomouto?"

"Um - yeah. Hang on." Dr. Enomouto parted the curtain to look in on me, huge metal coffee mug dangling off his thumb. Glanced at the whining machinery and the red IV line leading in and out, and winced. "Ouch. That looks like it hurts."

"Ya think?" I quipped. "Daniel told you to be sneaky?" I gave the empty mug a jaundiced once-over. "What happened to his coffeepot?"

"He thinks the new exo-bio guys might have borrowed it," Enomouto shrugged. "Don't know why... he's tracking them down now."

"God help the poor bastards," I breathed.

Dark brows climbed. "He's that bad?"

"Multiply whatever you're thinking by a hundred. At least." I shook my head in pure disbelief. Probably was the exo-bio guys, at that; nobody else in the Mountain would have dared get between Daniel and the worship of the sacred bean. "So he told you to be sneaky? Wouldn't do you that much good; Janet might be sacked out right now, but she's got a sixth sense when it comes to Daniel stealing her coffee. Probably extends to you by proxy."

"That wouldn't surprise me," the linguist admitted with a wry grin. "But he said I'd probably need to be sneaky off-world sometime, and I might as well practice somewhere it won't get me shot."

What do you know. Space monkey actually listened once in a while.

I grimaced, and slapped that thought down. Fact was, Daniel listened a lot. He just didn't always match listening to acting. "You have to be anywhere for a half-hour or so?" Given it'd probably take Daniel at least that long to try politeness on the geeks, before hauling out the ear-savaging Ancient Egyptian curses.

Brown eyes blinked behind glass. "Not really..."

I jerked a thumb toward a stray chair. "Got a hypothetical I need to run by somebody." And I didn't want to try it on Sam or Teal'c; they were too close to the idea. Not to mention, they were tied up at the moment, hopefully throttling details out of a certain three-member - or was that six-member? - Tok'ra information-gathering party who'd just, oh, casually dropped by to drop off a few leads on various System Lords' troop movements, and by the way, had we found anything on that last planet?

Hmph. And a resounding hah.

Whatever info they were bringing to trade wasn't nearly as interesting as who had brought it. Sermane, Jacob - and Judith Williams. How had our little ex-Firm agent managed to talk the Council into letting her back to Earth so soon, when Jacob had needed to fake a mission to find Seth to do it?

I _wanted_ to be up there. But letting the Tok'ra in on the whole _ib-seshatai still exist and instinctively hate your guts_ situation fell into the category of Really Bad Idea. So, here I sat.

Damn it, nothing better happen to Sam's tape of the meeting. If I couldn't be there, I could at least kibbitz afterward.

Enomouto pulled up a chair as far from the whining machine as he could, twitching nervously. "Hypothetical?"

"I was thinking." I gave him a second to clear any _I thought I smelled something burning_ remarks out of his head. "Hypothetically, if we ran into an alien here on Earth - even a friendly alien, even one of our allied Tok'ra who'd come here for a new host but just didn't want to tell us about it - people at the top wouldn't like it much. Worse, they'd probably do something about it."

Some of the twitches faded, as the linguist gave me a sober look. "Worse?"

"You think getting locked in Area 51's a way to win friends and influence people?"

"Definitely worse," Enomouto agreed. "So what are you going to do about it?"

Pleasant. Keep it pleasant. "I said hypothetical."

"Well, yeah." Enomouto ducked his head, reddening a little. "But sometimes - just sometimes, mind you, but my family's a little crazy and it's always better to count on that - sometimes hypotheticals bite you in the... ankle, before you really expect them to. And if just a little of what I've picked up out of the local informal informational networks about what happened to Major Carter is right... I mean, if _I_ got jumped accidentally-on-purpose, I'd really like to know what would happen to me in advance. Right?"

I arched a brow. "You interested in hosting an ally, Dr. Enomouto?"

"_Kuso,_ no!" Enomouto looked a little pale. Couldn't blame him. "But just because I think you'd have to be raving _insane_ to want to do that, doesn't mean somebody else might not. Ever been to a college science fiction club, Colonel? I bet a Tok'ra could find people there who'd _want_ to be intergalactic spies. Who might even have a pretty decent idea what they'd be getting themselves into. At least as much as any of us who haven't had them in our heads. Somebody ought to at least think about what we should do if that happens. Right?"

Yeah. Yeah, somebody should. And given that somebody ought to be pretty high up on the SGC food chain, _somebody_ looked like it ought to start with me. "Notepad."

"What? Oh, okay..." Enomouto wandered over to where Janet kept pens and papers, fumbled around for a minute, came back into view with a ballpoint and a handful of scratch paper for notes. "This do?"

"Thanks." I scribbled down a few ideas, some of the top of which included _talk to Hammond_ and _sic Dr. Baird on it_. Hey, I'm a Colonel. I wouldn't have got this far if I didn't know when to delegate. Especially when I'm feeling... really... lousy...

"Colonel?" The voice was thin and far away. "Colonel, are you okay?"

Faint. But loud. Because a sound was missing. A heartbeat.

My heartbeat.

"Dr. Fraiser, help!"

Dark slammed down.

---------------

_Hannibal_

"And when I do this?"

"Ow." I scowled a little at Dr. Takani as she took the little stick-you-with away from my finger. Kept my voice down, though; this was the doc's kitchen, and there was a cute little four-year-old girl in the living room next door over, being lulled to sleep with moon-rabbit stories by her somewhat less cute and probably lethal martial artist of a daddy. "Come on, Doc. We did this all already at the clinic-"

"We did this at sunset," Megumi said matter-of-factly, sniffing her sample before she stored it in her medical bag. "If you are a true dhampire, you probably cycle through the day; vampire uppermost at night, human during the daylight. I'll want to look you over near dawn and again in full day to be sure, but so far, you do seem to fit the pattern."

Pattern? For a second, I couldn't breathe. "You mean... there are other people like me?"

"You're not common, Mr. King - but yes. There are a few." She picked up a few of her notes, read them over silently. "Though from what I've heard, most of them don't manifest the extreme vampire traits you do. Your vampiric parent must have been very powerful, or exerted a profound influence on your development. Or both." Megumi gave me a dead-sober look. "Usually only male vampires sire offspring, but given this... was it your mother who walked the night?"

"Um." I scratched the back of my neck. "About that..."

She gave me a minute, sighed when I couldn't find the words. "Tell me later if you can, Mr. King. For now, just know that your system is biased enough toward the vampiric that - forgive me - I would be failing you as a doctor if I didn't warn you about risky behavior."

"Huh?"

"Be careful when you bite," Megumi said precisely. "Especially if, and forgive me again for being blunt, your partner has willingly or unwillingly cheated on you with a full vampire. Which happens all too often; historically, vampires seem to take a sadistic glee in stealing willing lovers from half-blooded offspring... Anyway. Instead of forming the mating bond that should occur, the combined magical exposure could be enough to pull someone still alive but with the vampiric curse in their system over into true undeath."

I couldn't breathe. I couldn't think. Everything just... whited out.

_Tatjana._

_My fault._

"Head down. Slow and easy, guy... damn, Megitsune, what'd you tell him?"

"The truth," the doc said softly. "Careful, Sano. He could probably take Saitou putting him through a wall and walk away afterward."

"Heck, Kenshin can do that... um. Yeah. About Saitou... you've got bandages around here, right?"

"Of course I do!" Long dark hair shook over her shoulders, exasperated. "Why... oh no."

"Oh yeah," Sano said wryly, watching me as I blinked my way back to reality. "We ought to sell tickets."

"_Tickets?_ To watch Saitou- you- you _rooster-head!_"

"Ooo, I love it when you talk dirty, fox-woman." The martial artist gave her a lecherous grin.

Marital romping aside, I was more worried about the sounds filtering in from outside the house. Growls, hisses, steel on steel-

"Don't go out there!"

"Why-"

Megumi caught me at the back door, worry and exasperation warring in her eyes. "They're not always careful-"

"Especially when they're having fun," Sano put in behind me.

_"Fun?"_ Megumi growled.

Her husband gave her a skeptical eyebrow right back. "And just how many people are there who can give Kenshin a good workout, huh?"

Heck. This I had to see.

I opened the door to a steel whirlwind.

Not literally, thank goodness; just two guys with swords dancing up, down, and over anything in the doc's backyard sturdy enough to hold a person's weight for half a second.

_Just._ Blade would have a fit. If he weren't right in there swinging.

'Cause sure as the sun rose, my ex-partner would have smelled magic.

The taller guy's scent hit me first; human and wolf, mingled together. Like Detective O'Connell's, but stronger. He stalked his prey like a two-legged demon, eyes wolf-yellow in the night, fist striking whenever he spied an opening, blade a silver-blue weave of slices and parries and thrusts that would have killed anything a heartbeat slower.

Only the redhead never slowed down; a blue shadow in night's darker blue, sheath smashing an elbow before the fist could reach him, blade too fast to see, gaze an amber flicker of dark delight.

I took in the show for a few amazed seconds, watching hands, feet, and blades move like an avalanche against the soul of fire. And stifled a yelp as Megumi thwacked me on the shoulder. Okay, obviously humming "Everybody was kung fu fighting," wasn't the way to get on her good side...

_No scent? There's got to be a scent._

Hadn't had to do this in a while, but... I let my mouth open to moisten the air coming in, to pick up just a little more scent than normal. The redhead was there; I could see him - barely - and hear him - again, barely. Faint or not, he _was_ solid. And solid ought to smell like something...

Feathers. No... furry scales. And human.

Furry scales? What the heck was that? Outside of dangerous enough to get even Blade to tackle him from a distance.

A shift in stances, and they both paused, gazes part on me, part on each other. Sheathed their blades, and bowed. "Next time, Battousai," the wolf-guy smirked through his split lip.

"In your dreams, Saitou." The redhead touched the edge of what was going to be a heck of a shiner, grin just as toothy as his opponent. Despite the blood. No wonder Sano had asked about bandages; good as these two obviously were at dodging, they both looked like they'd gone two out of three with a paper shredder.

Megumi gave a kind of strangled growl, slipping into a pair of the sandals by the back door to march out there like the Doc o' Doom. "Did you _have_ to do that in my _backyard?_"

"Oro?" The redhead blinked, amber fading to innocent violet. "But Megumi-dono... here, we will not trouble anyone who might call far more medical attention than is truly needed..."

"_Would_ call," Megumi bit out, plucking up a half-shredded blue gi to get a look at the damage. "And don't be so sure you won't need it, Ken-san!"

Behind me, Sano was stifling what sounded like a cavalry charge of cackling laughter.

"Would you rather we did it on top of the police station?" Saitou's grin was all wolf fangs. "They could use the stimulation."

"They'd probably shoot you both," Megumi grumbled, nimble fingers moving past cuts and slashes with disbelieving shake of her head. "And I'd cheer them on. Grown men, ha! Do you see Tokio and Kaoru trying to kill each other every time they're in the same zip code?"

Saitou chuckled darkly. The redhead sighed.

Megumi groaned. "Oh, tell me they're not..."

"Bokken and padded staff," the redhead said hastily. "Kaoru wished us not to hover."

"Is that what she told you, Battousai?" Saitou stepped slightly away, glancing over the wreck of what had been his dark blue shirt. "Tokio told me to 'go play'."

I leaned against the doorway, taking mental bets on just who was going to take another swing at who first. And who might come out on top if they decided to play dirty, instead of just serious. At the moment, I was leaning toward Saitou - but that was only 'cause these two were good enough it'd come down to who had the faster swing, and Megumi had a grip on the redhead like grim death, even though she didn't _look_ like she expected him to try to go anywhere.

Not getting a rise out of his sparring partner, Saitou decided to turn a lazy glint of teeth my way. "Well. You're definitely not him."

And the whole yard seemed to relax a little.

"Him?" I asked dryly.

"Or her," Saitou answered, just as dry. "The scent was too degraded by undeath to be certain. But you - you are alive."

_Alive. God, I only wish._ My fists clenched. "Sorry to disappoint."

"No?" Wolf-yellow slid a glance Kenshin's way. "You, of any of us, know the quick from the dead."

The redhead looked me over - which is kind of like saying _the bomb dropped and went off_. I felt that glance, head to toe, like a lick of flame sheeting down my bones.

And then he smiled, amber glints vanishing from violet like they'd never existed. Walked over, and touched the back of my hand, right where the pulse fed into my fingers. "Death has held you in the past, Hannibal-san. And one day it may take you again, as it comes for all that live. But for now, you are alive, as any of us."

"That's-" _Impossible_ stuck in my throat. I knew liars. And he _wasn't lying._

_"I may have exaggerated the severity of your condition." _

Doc Strange's words, best as I could remember, before we went up against Varnae and I died. Again. Only to wind up as some kind of hybrid vampire creature with Frank, and once we got separated again... well, I figured it was back to square one. Not vampire, not human, not anything for certain except stuck with one foot in the grave.

And if I'd _felt_ alive for sure, once I'd dropped through the portal into this world's San Francisco, alive enough to fall hard for a lady despite the ever-nagging urge to taste her blood - well. Hope springs eternal, right?

Sano cleared his throat. "So... you _don't_ think you're a dhampire?"

"It's a long story." But first things first. "What scent?"

"There have been eyes on Tokio and I since we left Hawaii." Saitou's eyes glittered. "Whether it was tracking us, or simply coming here, I do not know. We seem to have lost it near Colorado Springs. But the scent was undead, and sorcery... and a hint of the items you and the rooster-head found in 1924, Battousai."

Kenshin stiffened slightly. "La Llorona's items?"

"What else?"

"The Wailing Woman?" I put in fast. Hell, damn, no - we did _not_ need a life-sucking specter that drowned people in Carson Springs-

"One who used the legend, _hai_." Violet twinkled with amusement. "Once upon a time, in Mexico..."

_Oh god, a hanyou who makes bad puns,_ I thought incoherently. _What did I do to tick You off?_

Oh yeah. Flipped off the sky. Figured.

Sano was waving his hand in front of my face; let out a breath of relief when I blinked. "You gotta take these guys in small doses," he said practically. "Come on. You and I can get some coffee, and the kitsune will slap these idiots with bandages, and we'll all talk."

---------------

Translations and info:

_Hanyou_ - half-demon.

_Kami_ - spirits, deities.

_Ki_ - energy, spirit.

_Kiryuu_ - fire dragon, spirit dragon.

_Kitsune_ - fox, fox-spirit.

_Kunai_ - small throwing daggers; sometimes effectively very large, sharpened nails.

_Kuso_ - "damn it".

_Onmitsu_ - spies, ninja.

_Tanuki_ - "raccoon dog", native to Asia.

_Youkai_ - demon, phantom, supernatural creature.


	3. Chapter 3

_Sam_

"But he's all right now?" I got out, looking at one very unconscious Colonel curled up under infirmary bedcovers. God, even Jack's _hair_ looked like it hurt.

"I think so." Janet didn't quite slump in her chair, but she looked like she wanted to. "Good instincts, Dr. Enomouto. But next time, call a nurse first."

"Sorry," our new linguist said sheepishly. "But he was crashing, and that was the only thing going, and-"

Janet stopped him with a raised hand. "Call a nurse first, next time." Tired brown eyes switched to the General. "Sir, it looks like the magnetic option is out."

Hammond looked ready to chew through the iris. "What exactly happened, Doctor?"

"His blood pressure crashed, and his heart stopped." Janet shook her head when the General would have said something. "No, I don't know why. But in retrospect, I can make an educated guess. I should have thought of it before..." She visibly collected herself. "Sir, the cellular mimics can apparently shift form as needed, and they obviously consider high magnetic fields to be a hostile environment. And we've been steadily reintroducing a swarm of magnetically charged cells into the Colonel's bloodstream. That's not an external hostile environment, it's an _internal_ hostile environment. The stimuli would have been-" She hesitated. "General... I think they reacted as if the colonel were being _eaten._"

A graying red brow went up. "Eaten?" Hammond said incredulously. "Doctor, you just said they stopped his heart. Now, I may not be any kind of biologist, but last I knew, it's counter-survival to keel over when a predator's trying to eat you."

And… he looked at me. Why me? Hello? Astrophysicist, not biologist. Chemicals that aren't on our periodic chart? Supernovae? Faster-than-light engines? I'm your scientist. Green stuff, or things that go twitch? No way. I may have lucked out with those alien sound-sensitive plants, but that's not something I want to try twice.

"Not always, according to our exobiologists," Janet picked up the slack. "Not if it's not so much trying to escape being eaten, as being digested."

Hammond gave her a _look._ "The one generally precedes the other, Doctor."

"Not in spiders."

I stifled an involuntary _Meep!_ But - that was just our magnetic setup, not a hairy… fangy… creepy-crawly….

"Spiders, fungi, certain very disgusting deep-sea creatures - they all digest you first, General," Janet went on. "And to a certain extent, they rely on your own bloodstream transporting the digestive toxins and enzymes to kill you." She glanced toward Jack. "This may well have been a last-ditch survival mechanism, kicking in against... well, against whatever preys on changelings."

The infirmary door rattled, and a white-faced Daniel rushed in. "Oh no. Oh, Jack-"

"What does prey on changelings, Dr. Jackson?" Hammond asked.

"Wha..." He stopped a few feet away from Jack's bed, trading a blink with Dr. Enomouto. "Well... that depends. Most of the folklore on youkai and similar creatures would be what humans saw, so it's not exactly a random sample.… Humans, a lot of the time. Or sorcerers, who might or might not be human. Or other youkai. The arthropod youkai tend to be really, really nasty; centipedes, giant mantises, spiders-"

"They're thinking this might have been a spider-bite reaction," Enomouto put in.

"Oh." Daniel winced. "Oh, ow, Jack..."

"That doesn't explain why they _stopped_ his _heart,_" Hammond said, aggrieved. "I would think that should be as lethal as any predator."

"Maybe not," Janet said thoughtfully. "We've been dealing with blood, but if the creature's entire cellular makeup has the same characteristics-"

"It might be flexible in hazardous environments," I agreed, feeling the pieces fall together. I may not be a biologist, but I've sat through enough of Janet's lectures on biophysical weirdness happening to SG-1 to follow this. "Change skin permeability to allow oxygen transport _without_ blood, or even shift tissue into mini-hearts to circulate blood in unaffected areas..."

Janet frowned. "That'd require massive amounts of energy."

"Youkai _have_ massive amounts of energy," Daniel spoke up. "Legend says they change shape at will. That they have blood, and organs, and a heart just like we do - but they can survive massive loss of blood and organ injury most of the time, because the flesh 'flows' back together." He swallowed dryly. "Is - is Jack going to be okay? He's _not_ youkai, if he lost oxygen..."

"We had his heart moving again less than thirty seconds later," Janet said firmly. "His blood sugar was down again, and we have him on IV for that - but he should be fine. Assuming we don't find any more metabolic landmines." She gave Enomouto a measuring look.

"What?" he asked, nonplussed.

"Usually people get a bit more nervous when we start talking about mythological creatures," Janet observed.

Enomouto blinked. Started ticking off on his fingers. "Ra, Set, Hathor, Cronus, Yu... come on. This whole place is mythology in space. Why not cryptozoology, too?" He looked at his watch, and stifled a yawn. "Look, if nobody needs me... it's been a heck of a day, and I know Dr. Jackson wants me on that translation first thing tomorrow..."

"Good night, Dr. Enomouto," Hammond said firmly.

"Sir?" I asked in an undertone, after the infirmary door had closed behind Enomouto.

"In a minute, Major."

Minutes came and went, and I felt the funny prickle that was Teal'c walk down the corridor, just before he opened the door and came inside. "General Hammond."

"The Tok'ra are settled in the VIP quarters?"

"They are." A hint of humor glinted in Teal'c's impassive gaze. "Although Judith Williams requested Internet access. She claims to have missed national news, and online comics. Sermane seemed most perplexed."

I'll bet he was. Earth cultures are hard enough to understand when you grow up here. Not that I had much sympathy, after the game of _you tell me everything while I try to tell you nothing_ they'd played about P3X-459.

Though I had a feeling we might get more out of them separately than together. Based on a word Judith had dropped one moment when Sermane and my father weren't in earshot: _Pegasus_.

I didn't know what it meant yet, but I was going to find out.

The general waited a moment more, then nodded. "Do you have anything to add, Colonel?"

"Outside of, can we not do that again soon?" came the familiar grumble from the bed.

"Jack!" Daniel pounced.

"Ow, ow, ow-"

"Sorry, sorry..."

"Now that all those involved are present..." The general swept us with a grim look. "I have to inform you that Colonel O'Neill's course of treatment has become - complicated."

"Sir?" Janet's tone rang with, _just_ who _is the doctor in this base?_

Hammond let out a slow breath. "Diplomacy, Doctor. I've just been informed that our government's future access to potential Hivemind wreckage within Japanese territorial boundaries is highly dependent on our not doing anything more to jeopardize the cover of one of their government's protected witnesses against organized crime, in the form of the Yakuza and Triad organizations."

"Oh, you've got to be kidding," Jack groaned.

"From what I've been told, the Japanese government considers organized crime at least as much a threat to their society as alien invasion, Colonel, so no, I am not kidding," Hammond said sternly. "Dr. Jackson? Could this possibly be a bluff?"

"Um... knowing Kenshin, probably not," Daniel sighed. "Kenshin helps people, General. The Yakuza like to kick them when they're down. I'd be surprised if he hadn't crossed them."

"They expect us to believe they hid _their_ federal witness in _our_ country?" Jack growled.

"I've been informed it was the last place the Yakuza would look," Hammond said dryly.

"Ties up everything pretty neatly," I said ruefully. "His hiding, the fact that his records look good on the surface but don't match some of the facts we can find..."

"They don't _match_ because he's over a century old, Carter!"

"But we can't prove that. Sir." I glanced at the general. "Unless we can have some more time with the samples-"

"We've been strongly requested to bury them, Major." Hammond looked grim. "No names were named, but it seems the rogue elements of the NID now have an international reputation."

Janet sighed. "Let me see what I have that we'll have to get rid of..." She ducked under one of the infirmary hoods, poked around in her test tube racks.

And came out a minute later, pale. "They're gone."

"You are certain." Teal'c frowned.

Janet's shoulders stiffened. "Let's check exo-bio; I told them they could use some of the samples, but they might have taken more than I thought-"

"Oh no."

Daniel saying 'oh no' is along the lines of an ordinance officer saying 'oops'. "Daniel?" Jack asked dryly.

"Well... I was just down there, before I heard you were in trouble," our archaeologist admitted. "Um... I think someone let them use one of your gadgets by mistake, Sam, they had to haul out a fire extinguisher-"

I was out the door and gone.

---------------

_Daniel_

After the near-brawl in the exo-bio lab and a short night's sleep, I stared out into the dawn on the top of the Mountain. And shivered.

Not because it was chilly, though there was a near-frost hint to the air. Not because of how sick Jack had been; he'd been in Janet's care, after all, and she gave Death a run for his money every week. No; because of how _easy_ it'd been.

Kenshin's samples were gone. All of them.

Might have been a bit harder without Benkai's help. But probably not. I'm in and out of the infirmary all the time. Janet doesn't notice me unless I'm stealing her coffee. Heck - she'd probably only notice I'd been there if I _didn't_ try to steal her coffee.

But Benkai didn't have enough pull around here yet to wander into exo-bio as just part of the scenery. And given how fast the NID had moved in the past, we'd been short on time. So - he went to Janet, I went to exo-bio. With a relatively harmless gadget from Sam's lab in my pocket.

Samples, poof.

And nobody was even looking twice at me.

Scary.

The data Janet and exo-bio had gathered... well. I wasn't about to mess with their computers. But I suspected it'd go poof as well, very soon. There are distinct disadvantages to being linked in to a main network. Especially one that's been infiltrated by a certain programmed backdoor.

Archangel has some kind of mutual arrangement with Aoshi, after all. And Shinomori and Kenshin are as close as my team... used to be.

Even if they weren't - Aoshi _feels_ like Kenshin. Sort of. And if that feeling means what I think it does, Aoshi can't afford for the NID to have information on Kenshin. Not if he wants to stay alive and free himself.

_"I'm in,"_ Benkai said when I asked. _"Kenshin's... family."_

Which I guess means I have to watch out for Benkai, too. If Janet goes poking around in his blood, the jig really will be up.

_"How many youkai are there?" _

_"Who knows? They're out there. Once in a while we run into another one. Or pick up somebody else who's stuck between. Or end up having to... stop somebody."_

Benkai had winced when he said that. I knew that wince. I'd seen it in a mirror.

Dr. Benkai Enomouto might have a harmless record. Enomouto Benkai had killed. Probably in self-defense, probably when he had no other choice - but he'd done it.

Which, guiltily, made me feel better. I didn't want anybody else to end up like Rothman. Yes, the SGC needed more archaeologists and linguists... but I didn't want more innocent faces haunting my nightmares.

Dawn faded into daylight; I sighed, and headed back inside. Time to lay out a theory, and let everybody else shoot it full of holes. And hope that was all that got shot.

I'd bought the SGC time to think. The rest was up to them.

But even with that knotting up my stomach, I couldn't help but feel a thrill of excitement. Because if I was right... if I was _right_...

Then maybe I could prove Kenshin was human after all.

---------------

_Jack_

"I think the Tok'ra have been a little less than forthcoming," Daniel said, laying out photocopies on General Hammond's conference table for us to grab.

I trap one black-and-white printout of odd scribbles with a finger, feeling Sam's worried eyes on me as I lean back in my chair. Easy, Carter, I'm not going to break - even if Janet did say _do anything stupid and I sedate you._ No, really? The Tok'ra, hiding details? Heaven forbid.

"P3X-459 isn't a Goa'uld planet."

"Daniel Jackson?"

And Teal'c beat me to the punch. Okay, maybe I'm not as up to snuff as I feel.

"I think it was an Ancient one."

Whoa.

"The key word," Daniel stated, looking at Sam, "is Pegasus."

"What few Ancients references we've found seem to link to the Pegasus Galaxy," Sam reminded the general. And me, too - not that I'm going to let on about that. "But those were human dwellings, Daniel. And Pegasus isn't mentioned in your translations-"

"But _chimera_ is." There's a vivid light in Daniel's eyes as his finger dances over the flower-scribbles. "This is Luwian, Sam."

"Oh, _Luwian,_" I nodded. "Of course. _Daniel_..."

An eager smile flickered on his face. "Hang on, Jack. This gets a little complicated... but it fits, I think it fits, and if it does..." He visibly calmed himself down. "Luwian's extinct now, of course, but it's part of the Anatolian branch of the Indo-European language family..." He caught my eyes glazing, and ducked his head a little. "Remember how when you were stuck speaking Ancient, we figured out it was related to Latin? So is this. It's just a lot older than Latin. And it was spoken in Arzawa."

Teal'c frowned. "Where is Arzawa, Daniel Jackson?"

"No one's really sure," our archaeologist shrugged. "Somewhere west of the Hittites, we think, probably in Anatolia... but it's tied to the Atlantis legends, which also seem to be tied to the Ancients. And as far as we archaeologists can tell-" he laughed once, amazed, "-it was taken out from space."

"Dr. Jackson?" Hammond choked.

"That is the best evidence out there now, General," Daniel said matter-of-factly. "Of course, most archaeologists say comet, but knowing what we know about Goa'uld capabilities, and Selmac's account that they exterminated whole nests of _ib-seshatai_ and associated dragon-like creatures with aerial bombardment..."

"Pegasus?" I stick in.

"Comes from the Luwian _pihassas,_ 'lightning', or _pihassasas,_ their weather god or god of lightning, like Zeus or the Roman Jove," Daniel nodded. "Hesiod still has Pegasus carrying thunderbolts for Zeus. And one of the most popular legends we have of Pegasus is of the time Bellerophon, grandson of Sisyphus, rode the winged horse to kill the Chimera, a so-called monster usually depicted with a lion's head, a goat's body, and a serpent for a tail."

"From which we get the term _chimera,_ an animal created from two or more distinct genetic sources," Sam filled in for those of us not biologically inclined. "Once in a very long while they happen in humans, when fraternal twin embryos absorb each other. We can create them artificially; mixing a mouse embryo that was genetically white with one genetically brown, for example, to produce a mouse that's white or brown in patches, which are tissues developed from the original source cells. Some geneticists also use the term to refer to genetically engineered organisms..." Her voice dried up, and she paled.

"Just listen, Sam," Daniel said softly. "Listen. _Then_ tell me if you think I'm wrong."

Teal'c caught my eye, and inclined his head. "We are listening, Daniel Jackson."

"Chimera was the child of Echidna; _ekhis,_ the 'she viper', the Greeks' 'Mother of All Monsters'," Daniel went on. "She was supposed to have the head of a woman, but the body of a serpent or dragon. Her ancestry's unclear, but it's old, even predating the gods. When she and Typhon, her mate, attacked the gods, Zeus supposedly beat them back and sealed Typhon under Mount Etna - thus explaining its nasty tendency to erupt every once in a while. But Echidna and her children were allowed to live and challenge future heroes. Which, given what we now know, could just mean the gods - or the Goa'uld - couldn't catch them...

"Echidna's children included the Nemean Lion, Ladon, Chimera, Sphinx, Hydra, and Cerberus," Daniel ticked off. "All creatures that had recognizable characteristics of animals from Earth, recombined in new ways, with supernatural strength, toughness, and ability to regenerate. Even outside of those myths, we find depictions of hybrid animals - hippogriffs, chimerae, you name it - all over Anatolian art of the Luwian era."

"Which relates to P3X-459 how?" I asked pointedly.

He flipped open the photocopy, pointed to where flower-scribbles were under Ancient symbols. "That's how."

"Holy freaking..." I collected my jaw. I'm no linguist, but I've seen enough of Daniel's work to have half a clue. "Is that a syllabub?"

"Syllabary - yes. I mean, I think so. One symbol to a syllable, like Cherokee, or Japanese hiragana. The Luwian syllables don't exactly match up to the Ancient letters, but the people who lived there were trying to translate it. Trying to understand what happened to them."

"Just what did happen to them, Dr. Jackson?" Hammond asked carefully.

The way Daniel's jaw tightens, I think I already know. "Lab rats, huh?"

"From what they were trying to translate... from the way they slammed the door on the Stargate... Jack, that magnetic distortion _isn't natural._ They _created_ it. It probably hurts them too, if they go near it, but they had to do it. It's the only way they had to take out advanced technology - Ancient, Goa'uld, they probably don't care. They're hiding. And right now, they're probably scared to death. If they've passed down any stories, they know the UAV could be a probe - and it _saw_ them."

Sam shook her head frantically. "We didn't see anyone, Daniel-"

"Yes, we _did._" He flipped up the UAV's last image.

Dog. Lizard. Not really either, with four claws like taloned hands tucked underneath as it coiled through the air like a silver-white furry-scaled snake, or some fantastic dragon-creature off one of Cassie's anime movies. Eyes set forward, predatory. Alive. _Intelligent._

"General... there weren't just curses around the 'Gate," Daniel said firmly. "There were blessings over every household door. I haven't got them all translated yet, but they make reference to the _children of Cerberus_." He laid one of the carved river-rocks down on the table. "I've checked over my recordings of the tool-marks, General. Some of the hieroglyphs were chiseled. But others, like this one - I think they were carved by claws."

The general let out a slow breath. "You believe the inhabitants of this planet are some variant of these... youkai changelings."

"Sir, I think the changelings are _humans._" Daniel's knuckles were white. "Or... were. Before the Ancients started experimenting on them."

Hammond sat there for a frozen second. Glanced at Sam.

"If... youkai and humans can interbreed... yes, sir," she got out. "The odds of two unrelated species being able to do that are astronomical."

"Echidna was supposed to be born of those who came before the gods," Daniel stated. "_Before_ the Goa'uld. And the only aliens we know of who've been to this planet are the Goa'uld, the Asgaard - who came _centuries_ after them - and the Ancients."

"The Ancients were Asgaard allies," I point out. "Remember? The whole Four Races meaning of life stuff?" I _like_ Thor. I can't believe he'd ever mess with people that way. Or ally with people who did.

"The Nox were in that alliance too, Jack. And for some reason, they decided to pull out and go pacifist on their own planet, and leave the rest of us to deal with the Goa'uld, and the Replicators, and everything," Daniel points out right back. "And maybe we don't know anything about the Furlings, but both the Nox and the Asgaard consider us _very young_."

Sam looked downright grim. "Sir, he's… got a point," she said reluctantly. "From your account of the Hammer, Thor's own hologram in the labyrinth admitted that Cimmeria was established as a - species refuge, for humans. It might not be a big leap from that, to seeing humans as… lesser life forms."

"Lab rats," I muttered.

A kind of wicked glitter lit her eyes. "NIMH rats."

I cranked up a brow. "Major, I think I speak for us all when I say, huh?"

"Fictional intelligent creatures created by human experimentation, O'Neill," Teal'c stated. "Their increased capabilities allowed some of them to outwit their captors, escape, and live independently, creating their own hidden culture. They were successful, but remained in constant danger of discovery." At my blink, he added, "Cassandra Fraiser allowed me to borrow one of her reading assignments."

Survive, Evade, Resist, Escape. If a bunch of SGC personnel were grabbed by some alien with an experimental bent, that's what we'd do. Heck, sometimes that's what we've done.

And if whatever they'd done to us was permanent, and we couldn't fix it-

We'd live with it. Best way we could, without hurting other people.

Like… Himura has. Hell.

"It doesn't mean Thor knew about it, Jack," Daniel said quietly.

I shook my head. "Daniel. They're the Asgaard-"

"And they _weren't. Here,_" Daniel cut me off. "They couldn't catch the NID without our help, Jack. Why should they have had any better luck catching the Ancients if they were up to genetic manipulation?" He fixed me with a sympathetic gaze, then turned to Hammond. "But we can try to find out more about that later. The point now, General, is that if we're right, then the changelings are genetically manipulated humans. Like the Jaffa."

And Teal'c shoots me a look of pure, quiet triumph.

Oh yeah. Hat. Rabbit. Daniel's done it again.

I try not to grin too obviously as I turn to General Hammond. "Think we can make it fly, sir?"

"The official position is that whatever manipulations the Goa'uld may have performed on their DNA in the past, Jaffa are human, if off-world human… it's certainly a plausible argument, Colonel." For the first time in a while, Hammond looked downright intrigued. "You do understand that it may be a difficult argument to make, so long as it might be argued you are under outside influence."

"I was kind of hoping we could leave that out for now," I admitted. "Have Janet ground me, sir. Low blood sugar, some kind of suspected alien allergen… something like that. Just for a few days. Maybe we can work something out." I turned back to my team. "Right now, we've got some allies who want a few answers. So I think we should tell them what we can prove." I ticked the facts off on my fingers. "Doesn't look like there's any tech lying around to be grabbed. Doesn't look like there's any Goa'uld on the planet. Doesn't look like there's any human survivors."

"Jack-"

"Doesn't _look_ like it, Daniel," I said bluntly. "What it does look like, is there might be traces of naquadah to dig up, some funky archaic writing that should be just the ticket for breaking in our new linguist types - and, oh, some _really big_ predatory animals in the area. So we figure we might send another _armed_ team to poke around later, but there's no rush. Right?"

"You want us to lie to them, sir?" Sam said levelly.

"Like a rug, Major." I gave her a wry look. "You heard what Mairin and Selmac said about ib-seshatai - how they went after Goa'uld instinctively? Himura himself pretty much admitted that if he didn't _know_ Teal'c was one of ours, he'd have a hard time not killing him. And if Daniel's right, the people in that place are already freaked out. You want to take the risk of messing up any chance we have to really figure out what happened there by having some Tok'ra investigative team tromp through that 'Gate and get eaten?"

"They'd probably only chew in self-defense," Daniel snickered under his breath.

…He did not just say that. He did _not_ just say that. With a Sean Connery accent, no less. "Snake-dog," I said, with all a colonel's dignity backing it.

"Dragon." Blue crinkled behind glass, almost innocent.

"Cerberus. Three-headed snake-dog."

"Legendary dragons can have all the heads they want," Daniel said piously. "Ladon was a dragon. Hydra was pretty much a dragon. Echidna was maybe half-dragon."

"Snake-dog."

"Maybe, maybe… but the thing about snake-dogs? They probably wouldn't mind being called dragons. On the other hand, dragons - well, legend has them down as _very_ proud. They don't like being mistaken for something else, even when they _are_ something else. Which they are. Sometimes. Dragons shape-shift a lot."

I haven't lived this long without knowing when to make a strategic retreat. "Fine. But we call the planet Cerberus."

"They invoke that name in their blessings," Daniel nodded. Looked at the general.

"Cerberus it is," Hammond decrees.

Daniel relaxed a little. "Now all we need is a good honey-cake recipe."

"Daniel?" I shook my head, wondering if my ears were working.

"Well, we don't know how much of the myths about Cerberus are true," Daniel observed, "But none of us are Hercules. Come on, I'll explain while we talk to the cafeteria. They're probably going to want to hear this too..."

---------------

_Daniel _

The keyboard tapping slowed as I walked into the VIP quarters, and a curious brunette poked her head around her computer monitor. "Dr. Jackson! I thought you'd be in the meeting with Jacob and Sermane..."

"Hi, Ms. Williams. Mairin." Even feeling that odd prickle of nerves that seemed to mark Tok'ra these days, I had to smile back. Judith looked reasonably happy, and a lot healthier than she had when we'd first met. "Well, it was going to be more about tactics than linguistics, so I'd say Colonel O'Neill and Major Carter have it covered." Teal'c, as a general rule, tended to avoid the Tok'ra whenever possible. He covered it well, but he still remembered Jolinar saying he was _only_ Jaffa. Not an uncommon attitude problem among Egeria's offspring, unfortunately.

Besides which, I was fairly sure Teal'c had something in mind for today. Something he could only do off-base. I just hoped it worked.

Judith dipped her head, and Mairin lifted it. "I am curious, Dr. Jackson." Her voice was easier to listen to than a lot of symbiotes; she kept the reverberation toned down, more waves on the shore than thunder-rumble. "You are one of the few we have met who greets us both. Even Major Carter greets Jacob and Selmac as Jacob..." She let that trail off, into an elegant lift of brow.

"Human nature, I think," I shrugged. "We're used to looking at a person and seeing one individual. But you're not, really. You're more like... Siamese twins. It's rude to act as if you're not there, just because we can only see one of you at a time." I shoved up my glasses shyly. "If you'd rather I didn't-"

"No," Mairin said thoughtfully. "We both find it - comforting. And life among the Tok'ra is strange enough for Judith... and so also for me. I had not anticipated that." She frowned. "I do not think the Council would approve. They do not of Jacob, when he speaks in favor of aiding the SGC more directly." She paused then, and gave me a _look._

I've seen that look from Jack. I mimed a zipper across the lips.

Mairin relaxed a little. "I am young, so what views I have that diverge from the will of the Council are - tolerated. Much as you tolerate the idealism of your own... teenagers, is that the correct word? Jacob and Selmac are... not so fortunate."

"You say something, they laugh it off," I translated. "But Selmac's older and wiser, so the Council has to take him seriously. And they don't want to." I gave her a curious look. "Why?"

Mairin ducked her head, and Judith lifted it. "Mairin's not really sure. I think - I could be wrong, but I _think_ - it's because it moves away from what Egeria set up." She tapped a finger on the desk thoughtfully. "It's the classic revolutionary problem. She knew what she was against, but I'm not sure Egeria ever decided what she was _for_."

"You mean there's no-" I fumble for the kind of terms I've heard from Jack. Darn it, he should be here instead of me. "No exit strategy?"

"Undermine the System Lords. Play them against each other," Judith reported. "That's what Mairin has the genetic memories to do. Anything after that..." she spread her hands.

"But humans don't come with genetic memories," I pointed out. "We have to make it up as we go along." Careful, careful... "And we're allies now. Which means we get to lean on each other when one of us has a problem, and the other might have a solution."

"That would mean the Council would have to admit they don't have all the answers," Judith said dryly.

"Tricky," I agreed. "How _did_ you get them to agree you could come to Earth?"

Judith smiled. "As a wise man once said, sometimes it's easier to get forgiveness than permission."

Oh boy. "Um..."

"Don't worry, I'm sort of covered," Judith shrugged. "Though Selmac is stretching his authority just a little, having me here on his orders instead of the Council's, on a fact-finding mission. In truth, he already knows most of the facts we're going to lay out. And the key fact is that I'm an ethnobotanist, not just a spy."

"Oh?"

"The Council says we can't give the SGC advanced technology, and to some extent I have to agree with that." She held up a hand before I could say anything. "Ion cannons, for example - moral considerations aside, experimenting with that technology could lead to a lot of nasty situations Earth just doesn't have the safety protocols to deal with. Yet. But biology, chemistry... I've seen some of Dr. Fraiser's work with specimens from different planets, looking for new biochemical compounds that might have medical use. And you _have_ the protocols to deal with most of those hazards. I don't see any reason why we can't help there."

"Janet would love that," I said eagerly. "But - if the Council wants you on spying missions-"

"If they can let Freya and Anise hare off for decades at a time looking for those damn Antoniak armbands, they can spare us for ten years or so for this," Judith said wryly. "Later... well, we'll worry about later. But this can help the Tok'ra, too. I can go with your biologists and visit planets the SGC has ruled friendly. Find other places we can retreat to if we have to collapse another base. Possibly even tap whole other information networks the Tok'ra haven't had access to; people who won't talk to a low-level Jaffa or Goa'uld will talk to a wandering healer."

I had to smile. "You've got a plan."

"No, no," Judith shook her head firmly. "_Selmac_ has a plan. I'm just a lowly youngster. And when the oldest and wisest among us says jump, I say 'how high?'"

I snickered.

"Also," she hesitated. "I don't know much about that whole incident with the armbands, or the zatarc, but Jacob and Selmac have both argued that even though the SGC can work past what happened, the Tok'ra would get a lot more _willing_ help out of your various team members if we... gave something back. Like this."

"Which is small, and not important technology, so the Council might actually agree to let it slide," I observed neutrally.

She winced a little. "I wasn't going to put it that way."

"I know." I gave her a wry shrug. "If it helps, you can tell them we really will appreciate it. Getting something useful out of the Stargate program would make things a lot easier for General Hammond. Not to mention, it'd make being a Tok'ra host more attractive to a lot of people, if they knew they'd have the chance to help our planet directly."

"That should get their attention," Judith observed. "But I doubt you came to talk about my - that is, _Selmac's_ - pet project." She raised her eyebrows.

"Well, yes and no. We really did want to know. And now that we do, I can point you toward Janet and her new exo-bio team; maybe they can give you some extra ammo for the Council. Don't let the guys scare you too much," I added. "They haven't blown anything up. Yet."

"They sound like fun already," Judith grinned. "And the no?"

"What's Pegasus?" I gave her a measuring look. "What did you really know about P3X-459?"

She whistled softly. "Now that, is an interesting question."

I waited while she paced the room; from the way her head dipped and lifted slightly as she walked, there was quite a discussion going on.

The brunette head lifted, and I wasn't surprised to hear Mairin's voice. "I am not certain what information the Council may hold, but the information I am aware of is... surprisingly small."

I nodded slightly; _go on._

"I believe that address has not been visited by the Goa'uld since before I was spawned; for Egeria herself passed that knowledge to me, along with a warning."

"A warning would have been nice," I said faintly.

"I did not know you had not received it, Dr. Jackson," Mairin said regretfully. "And in justice to Selmac and Sermane, the warning I know of is - vague. Merely a memory that our technology fails us beyond the 'Gate, and that predators roam not far away. Perhaps they believed that Tau'ri technology was too primitive to be affected."

Not an apology, just a statement. I could live with that. "That actually does seem to be true," I admitted. "We thought we might go back there later. Very carefully. Those are really _big_ predators. But Pegasus?"

"Ah. Now that, as Judith would say, is interesting." Sitting down, she leaned her chin on her hand.

I dragged over a spare chair and sat backwards on it, facing her. "How interesting?"

"Selmac may know more, but what I know of the Ancients is, I think, little more than the SGC," Mairin stated matter-of-factly. "From their artifacts, they seem to have been humanoid. From your own discoveries, and some few of Anise's, they seem to have left a mark in the languages of this world. And from the memories Egeria passed to me, they were the true builders of the 'Gates." She let a faint smile touch her lips. "But reading reports to the Council, I know one thing you do not know."

Oooh. Drama. I let her draw it out, blinking wide-eyed to invite her to share the secret.

"Nirrti seeks Ancient devices."

Whoof.

Nirrti. The Destroyer. The Goa'uld System Lady who wiped out an entire settlement near a 'Gate, maybe an entire planet's population, to get us to bring Cassie back with a bomb inside. Who came as part of the Goa'uld negotiating team to take away our Stargates, all the while planning to use her nifty invisibility device to assassinate Cronus and pin the blame on Earth so it'd be destroyed. One _nasty_ lady.

Though in a crazy way, I thought she was one of the more sane System Lords out there. She didn't want to play with us. She didn't want to enslave us. She saw us as a threat, she moved to wipe us out. If Ra had had that much brains, he'd still be ruling Abydos.

"And one of the ways Nirrti does so, is by seeking in Goa'uld records for mentions of Pegasus," Mairin went on. "As there was one of P3X-459, in one of Cronus' databases we, and she, managed to infiltrate. I wonder if that was not part of the reason she attacked him here, to draw attention away from that invasion."

"Cronus has information on the Ancients?" That sort of made sense. The Cronus of myth was one of the Titans, who'd ruled before the Greek gods. Or possibly, other Greek Goa'uld. Echidna - well, her ancestry was a little muddy. Some myths said she was an offspring of Uranus and Gaia, who'd come before the Titans; others said she was the daughter of Ceto, who was pretty much a personification of the dangers of the sea, unknown terrors and bizarre creatures. Given what we'd found so far, I was leaning toward Ceto - and toward Ceto being an Ancient.

"He has some, discovered in a land 'beyond the southern wind'," Mairin nodded.

Beyond the northern wind would be Hyperborea, heading toward the North Pole. So beyond the southern wind would be- "Antarctica? Of course - the other Stargate was there, and Sam found a frozen Jaffa... but why is Pegasus the link?"

"I do not yet know," Mairin sighed. "I only know that it seems mentioned often when the Ancients are mentioned, often enough to be a guidepost to remnants left behind." She spread empty hands. "So I pass this crumb to you, that you might take it for what little warning it may be. We both know the Ancients' technology is not lightly to be tampered with. And if Nirrti were to acquire it..."

"Thank you," I said sincerely. And I meant it; if Nirrti ever did break free of Cronus and Yu, the people of Cerberus deserved a heads-up. "I promise we'll be careful. And if we find anything that looks like higher technology, we will ask for help. But right now, all there seems to be is a lot of plain old ordinary clay tablets."

Her hands overlapped each other, and she gave me a skeptical look. "And if there is technological information in those _ordinary_ clay tablets, Dr. Jackson?"

I gave her a wry smile. "General Hammond has standing orders for Sam not to activate anything that says _reactor_ on it without warning him first."

That just _might_ have been a glimmer of humor in Mairin's gaze. Maybe.

"Besides, we're allies now," I went on seriously. "If we find something, we'll share it. You know Judith; you know we mean what we say."

"I know you mean it, Dr. Jackson," Mairin said seriously. "And I know much of the SGC agrees with you. But as I know Judith, so I do know there are factions on Earth who may disagree. And I do know the Council. They are... cautious about this alliance."

"I guess they would be. You're used to trusting people related to you, and we're not. It's going to take time." I rose. "But I think we can work it out."

Mairin dipped her head, and Judith held out her hand. "I hope so, Dr. Jackson-"

Smiling back, I shook it. "Call me Daniel."

"Daniel," she nodded. "I really hope so. Because just between you, me, and Mairin," she cast a conspiratorial glance around the room, "some days, I've never had so much fun in my life!"

---------------

_Teal'c_

I strode through the corridors to the infirmary, scattering airmen, officers, and wide-eyed civilian scientists in my wake. Blood spattered my clothing, my hat had been torn in several places, and there were bruises my symbiote had yet to heal.

The day had been most productive.

"Teal'c!" Janet Fraiser moved toward me with narrowed eyes, already picking up fluids to cleanse my wounds.

"Doctor Fraiser," I inclined my head, offering a small sheet of paper. Turned to the man sitting on a table as the medical staff ran yet another series of unproductive tests. "O'Neill. I have obtained a prescription."

"From who?" O'Neill griped. "King Kong?"

I let one brow rise, amused. "He was not nearly so tall."

"Two weeks away from high-intensity magnetic fields, and - a purification ceremony?" Janet read.

"Its purpose is to remove youkai influence from mortal beings," I inform her. "I am told that for one who is born with the influence, the effects are only temporary; but for a human who has been tainted, it should be fully effective."

"Himura?" O'Neill said grimly.

"Concurred that it should be sufficient."

"Whoa, whoa - you didn't tangle with Himura?" O'Neill stood in disbelief. "How many of them were there?"

"Only one." I smiled at the memory of the fight. It had been a very long time since I had sparred with one so close to matching a Jaffa's strength and skill. "Hajime Saitou."

O'Neill gave me a searching look, and motioned me to sit, that Janet might tend my wounds. "Take it from the top."

"As your illness originated with Himura, I believed information on any treatment might be sought there as well."

"Right," Doctor Fraiser agreed. "That's why I sent Warner to talk to Takani. Only she wasn't talking."

"Nor has she," I acknowledged as skillful hands went to work. "Yet Megumi Takani is not the only one of Kenshin Himura's immediate acquaintances with medical experience."

"He said he got through WWII as some kind of quack herbalist," O'Neill stated.

"I do not believe he is a quack, O'Neill."

A skeptical glance. "So you went to the dojo to see Himura, and..."

"He appears to be entertaining visitors."

"Armed visitors?" O'Neill asked wryly.

I inclined my head. "Indeed."

"Don't mind me, I'm just quietly dying of anticipation..."

"I inquired if Kenshin Himura would be willing to assist us in our inquiries. Hajime Saitou challenged my right to make such a request, and in the next breath, my right to exist. Pointedly."

"Pointedly, as in-"

"He is quite skilled with a sword, O'Neill."

"Right. What was I thinking..."

"Although his style involves more ground-based thrusts and aggression than those employed by either Kenshin Himura or Kaoru Kamiya." I fingered a healing wound near my left collarbone, where the first thrust had surprised me. "Fortunately, I was able to grasp Tokio Saitou's _naginata_-"

"That better not be what it sounds like, Teal'c!"

"It is a Japanese spear, O'Neill."

"Oh. Well. You know, _mikta_... never mind." O'Neill blinked. "So he had a sword, and you had a spear... _please_ tell me we don't have to worry about homicide charges."

"He appeared conscious when I left," I observed. "And... amused." I frowned. "Though that may have been at the prospect of his wife's revenge. I believe I overheard Sanosuke Sagara observe that Tokio would be 'better at getting payback than anybody'."

"Great. So we got another might-be-youkai guy to look into - whoa. Saitou?" O'Neill regarded me with narrowed interest. "As in, Detective Ryan _Saitou_ O'Connell? The guy who went after the corpse-smoke?"

"There appears," I noted, "to be a resemblance."

"_Uncle_ Kenshin," O'Neill groaned. "I should've known..."

"Are you saying-?" Janet began.

"Yes, Doc. We have a changeling in the local cops." O'Neill covered his eyes with his hands, kneading at the headache his muffled curses indicated was present. "And how the hell we're going to get a good look at his records without an excuse..."

"Some of Hajime Saitou's history will not need investigation, O'Neill."

He parted his fingers to give me a wary look.

"I reviewed your and Major Carter's work on the history of the Bakumatsu," I explained. "A Hajime Saitou was Captain of the Third Unit of the Shinsengumi, who were often tasked with pursuing Battousai. He was well-known for the left-handed thrusting technique called _Gatotsu_." I almost touched the itching wound. "It is most effective."

"Urk..."

"As in, they were on different sides," Janet stated.

"As once were we, Doctor Fraiser." I raised a brow. "It is possible that once the conflict was ended, the Demon of Kyoto and the Wolf of Mibu discovered their common goals were more congruent than opposing."

"Wolf?" O'Neill asked bluntly.

"So the Shinsengumi were called," I nodded. "_Miburou._ The Ronin of Mibu, or the Wolves of Mibu." I thought back to the pure ferocity of my opponent, that nonetheless had never clouded his ability to think. "From what I have learned of Tau'ri wolves, the name is appropriate."

O'Neill took the prescription from Janet, read it over. "You're the doc, Doc."

"I don't see how it could hurt," Janet said frankly. "But if you don't mind, I'd like to run this past Dr. Baird - given there's a definite psychological aspect to these ceremonies - and Major Carter."

"Major Carter?" I inquired.

"She's mentioned some work by an East Coast parapsychologist that might be relevant," Janet explained. "I'd feel a lot better about following this course of treatment if I knew what a purification does on a scientific level."

Ah. Quite reasonable. "I hope to see you improved soon, O'Neill."

"Hold up a minute." The colonel regarded me with a look he had once given to intars; cautious, with a shrewd thoughtfulness on how they might change our current tactics. "You didn't have time to look up all this stuff on Miburou before you got here."

"I did not," I acknowledged. "Major Carter brought the Bakumatsu to my attention, and I investigated the information available in English. There is a sizable amount devoted to that group of warriors. Evidently they are honored, despite having been on the losing side."

"Sizable amount," O'Neill echoed. "Tell me you only put it together _after_ you fought the guy, Teal'c..."

"As Himura seems unlikely to spar with us at any level approaching his true abilities, the next best judge of his proficiency would be a battle with one of his frequent opponents," I noted, still faintly tasting blood. "Hajime Saitou was regarded as one of the three strongest swordsmen within the unit. I do not believe he has lost any of his skill."

Janet traded an incredulous glance with O'Neill. Who sighed. "See, now, _this,_" he grumbled under his breath, "is why I tell Daniel not to touch things!"

---------------

_Sam_

Houston, we have bouncy Daniel, full speed ahead.

Well, not that I can blame him for going at the fastest speed we can and still let Teal'c scout the territory with some measure of caution. We hadn't been here on Cerberus nearly as long as the last time, but the colonel was already looking a little pale around the mouth. I was within grabbing range in case he started to crumple, Dr. Enomouto was on his other side. Not that Ben looked all that together himself. First time through the 'Gate gets everyone, I guess.

Daniel hadn't insisted we bring the new guy. But given Dr. Enomouto apparently had a few scholarly papers on exactly this kind of defensive curse, and that we didn't _think_ the natives would be actively hostile - well, he'd asked. Especially given we might need one more person to haul the colonel back through the 'Gate if they _were_ hostile.

I didn't overhear all of Colonel O'Neill's argument with General Hammond about why he should be deliberately heading into a dangerous off-world environment. I did catch a little about Ancients, possible technological exchange, and needing two weeks straight demagnetized.

Most of which I agreed with. Kind of. I might not be able to verify everything Drs. Stantz and Venkman had published - ghosts, yeah, _right_ - but Dr. Spengler was a fellow physicist. His research on the similarities between electromagnetic and psychokinetic energy was persuasive. Especially his articles on purification ceremonies as a controlled invocation of particular PKE frequencies to filter out alien influences from human biorhythms. All of which argued that the prescription Teal'c had obtained - stay away from outside magnetic influence to strengthen host biorhythms and make the intruding energies more "obvious", then use an opposing frequency to cancel out the alien waveform - was probably the psychokinetic equivalent of chicken soup for a cold: traditional, nonscientific, but symptom-specific and effective.

As in, it should work. But it would work best if we had Jack away from magnetic fields for that straight two weeks. Meaning if we wanted to visit Cerberus, we should do it now.

And if Daniel was right that we'd scared the locals, we _had_ to do it now. How could we justify making them our allies if we left them hanging on tenterhooks, convinced our probe was the first wave of an invasion?

Not to mention a chance to poke into the kind of advanced tech I'd only gotten a taste of on Ernest's planet... the thought made me want to drool.

At least, it should have. But I kept thinking back on what Daniel had put together, that the Ancients might have experimented on humans the way we did lab rats - and drool turned to ashes in my mouth.

Could we learn anything from remnants of a people like that? _Should_ we?

But one thing was sure. Whatever was out there, we couldn't let the Goa'uld have it.

And - Daniel took one more step, and let out a breath of pure relief. "Looks like the UAV was right."

I followed the wave of his hand, looking down at the wildflowers under our feet. Blinked, and looked again. _Impossible._

An invisible line had been drawn along the greensward, right behind where Daniel was now standing. On one side of it, little butterfly-types and glistening beetles flew from flower to flower, snaky purple-and-green velvet worms chasing after them for snacks.

On the other side - nothing.

Same flowers. Same sun. Same _everything,_ far as I could tell. But not one animal to be seen.

Okay, I was now officially spooked. "Colonel?"

"Huh." He shrugged. "Can't tell you, Carter. Doesn't feel any different on this side than that one."

"But this is about where the UAV indicated the magnetic distortion would end, right?" Ben's color looked a little better. Maybe he was finally getting used to the whole my-god-I'm-on-another-_planet_ idea.

"It has," I nodded, checking my instruments. "This is about Earth-normal."

"Indeed." Teal'c traded a sober look with the colonel, moved off to scout the perimeter more thoroughly.

"Okay." The colonel looked up at the forested hills in the distance, looked around at the fairly clear line-of-sight we had here, glanced at the little brook running through a rocky incline a bit down-slope from us. And of course, looked up at the sky. "All right... this should do. Daniel?"

Working with Dr. Enomouto, Daniel laid out the supplies they'd scrounged out of the SGC kitchens. Weighted, square-ish foil shapes of Ancient writing. More foil, snipped into the flowery Luwian he'd found in the abandoned settlement. And on top of a rather prosaic picnic blanket, the odd, sweet-sticky confections our archaeologist had charmed the cooks into making.

"Get their attention from the air, I got," the colonel noted. "Say hi in a way they might understand, I got. But cake? _Daniel_..."

"It's in the legends," Daniel said soberly. "More the Roman legends than the Greek, but given Ancient has common roots with Latin, well... Cerberus, Jack. When Hercules was ordered to fetch Hades' guardian to the surface, some of the legends say all it took was the hero treating him with kindness - the 'first kindness he had ever known'. And when regular humans like Aeneas and Psyche had to get past him, they fed him honey-cakes." He hesitated. "I know Aeneas' were supposed to be drugged, but we're trying to be friendly here, and at least some of the Psyche legends just say she fed him and was kind, no drugs."

"And they're sweet," Ben added. "Who doesn't like sweet?"

"Just remember, your boss over there got married because of a candy bar," the colonel said dryly.

"...Eep?"

The colonel's eyes half-closed, and I could all but hear him thinking, _geek. Why me?_

"It was a lot more than a candy bar," Daniel reassured the new guy. "Ra, impending mine visit - I'll fill you in later-" He stopped, blinking hard.

"Above," Teal'c's level voice carried across the field.

Oh. My.

Silvery-white with a subtle pattern of pale green, curling in the wind. Its mane blew back as it hung in the air, looking us over from what it obviously felt was a comfortable height of a few hundred feet.

And it was _big._ Twenty, maybe thirty feet, with more complex scale-patterns and a somewhat more bulky build than the one we'd caught on tape. Oh hell. Don't tell me...

"Carter? You thinking what I'm thinking?"

I winced. "The one that - um, masticated - the UAV was younger, Sir?"

"Teenager," the colonel sighed. "Figures."

"We are being watched," Teal'c murmured, scanning the bushy cover ahead and to the sides.

"Of course," O'Neill said lightly. "Daniel, you're on."

Daniel let out a sigh to calm himself down, then stepped forward and let out a string of odd-sounding syllables that hopefully meant, _Hi, I'm Daniel Jackson, we come in peace, would you like to talk?_

I don't think I've ever seen a dragon look skeptical before. It drew in a snarling breath-

Blinked. Eeled down through the air, hovering almost eyeball to green-gold eyeball no more than twenty feet from us. _Sniffed._

Blinked again, and flicked back up into the air above us, like a hawk riding a thermal to spy out the landscape.

And that's when air rippled, arrows and spears and the grim hands holding them appearing out of spots I would have sworn were empty before. Damn. Nirrti really _would_ love this place.

The colonel cleared his throat. "Talk faster."

---------------

_Daniel _

Nice thought, Jack, but I don't think so. We had our peace message written out on the ground back there, our goodwill cakes waiting, and a bunch of very nervous, very _dangerous_ armed people here, who were taking the opportunity to get an up-close-and-personal look at the weird strangers who got past their _Keep Out_ signs. I planned to let them look as long as they liked.

I was taking the opportunity to look back, after all; adding up bronze weapons, fine-woven plaids in woodland colors, and snake and other odd creatures embroidered on leather trousers to try and guess what we were dealing with here. Besides people who seemed to range from garden-variety dark-haired, blue and green-eyed Caucasoid human to... not quite.

_Claws. _

She held her spear so naturally that it was the white hair I'd noticed first. It was _different,_ and most cultures get a bit touchy about different. So I looked her over out of the corner of my eye, taking in an odd sharpness to the young woman's features, the golden gleam of her eyes, the way her fellow warriors had given her just a little more space than most of their comrades, as if they expected her to move the way Jack would when he was ticked...

Which was when I saw the claws. And tried not to let my jaw drop.

A second quick look told me she wasn't the only one. At least two more out of the dozen eyeing us had them as well. One of them, a girl just past her teens, looked almost "normal" otherwise; while the sober older man a few people away from her was somewhere in between, near-blond hair streaked with gray, eyes a bright green I'd never seen on anyone not wearing contacts.

_Everyone's armed, and there are no kids,_ I added up. _They were expecting trouble._

No elders, either. Except for the gray-haired woman leaning on her staff as she stepped out of that shimmer, cloaked and scowling, giving me the kind of look I'd once gotten from a village headman as a young archaeologist in Egypt.

As in, _you are in_ so _much trouble, kid._

"Why do you bring one here who smells of our enemies?" she snarled.

_Literally_ snarled; some of that body posture and lip-writhing would have fit right in at a tiger cage. Focus, language... not quite Luwian, not Ancient even if it had a little of the flavor; definitely Proto-Indo-European rootstock. Okay. I could deal. And - here we go again. "Teal'c no longer serves the false gods-"

She snorted. "The Titan's creation? _Him_ we can kill, if there is need; and the mind-serpent that lairs within him. Are you blind, cub? Or has the blood of ours that foe has witched into his own veins clouded your spirit-sense to the truth of him?" Wrinkled and angry, her finger jabbed at Jack. "_That_ one!"

...Whoa.

"So you were deceived," the elder observed. Looked back over her shoulder-

"No, no, wait, _please!_" I flung myself into the most likely spear trajectory, hands spread out, beseeching. "He's not your enemy!"

"Daniel?" Jack snapped.

"Not now," I said quickly. "Oh gods, Jack, I think they think you're an Ancient-"

"Say _what?_"

"He's _human,_" I insisted in the elder's tongue, talking fast. "The glyphs we used to draw your attention - they are not of our blood! We have only found them, on other worlds; studied them, to try and learn their secrets. We are of Gaia. Of the world your ancestors were stolen from, ages and ages ago..."

Low whispers, from some of the older warriors to the elder; I couldn't quite make them out. She didn't seem to have a problem, stepping forward to look me in the eye. "Only two who stand here are not _of_ Gaia, young cub. As only three are not of Cerberus." A slight jerk of her head grouped Sam, Teal'c, and Jack as one.

Which was something I'd never seen anyone do before. Oh, sure, people had split up SG-1 on basis of warriors versus scientists, or humans versus Jaffa - but people working on the basis of who looked related usually lumped me in with Sam.

_Related? Why did I think- Oh, a kind of generative of,_ I thought fast. _Out of, born of, blood of-_

"Why is it that you speak to us, and your elder nest-mate does not?"

"Benkai doesn't know your language yet. I don't know it very well either, I hope you will forgive me if I offend..." Wait a second. Elder? "Benkai," I muttered under my breath in Japanese, "why does she think you're older than I am?"

The dark-haired linguist cleared his throat. "Um..."

"Please tell me you're not as old as Kenshin."

He relaxed a little. "Nope."

Which left a lot of leeway, come to think. "Older than Hammond?"

"Er..."

I should have known. Since when is anything in my life normal? "When this is over, you and I have to talk." Something else nibbled at my attention. "And why does she keep calling me _cub?_"

"Well, I don't know about here, but on Earth, that translation's used as a nonspecific youngster term, hanyou and youkai," Benkai said practically. "Doesn't usually offend, so it's good if you're not sure what type of youkai you're dealing with." Brown eyes stole up to our hovering watcher. "Not to mention, dragons usually use cub. At least for the older young."

"You think-?"

"If they're not _ryuu,_ they're damn close," Benkai said softly, wonder bright in his gaze. "Wow."

"Anybody going to speak English anytime soon?" Jack grumped.

"Terminology," I said in that language. _Two not of Gaia, three not of Cerberus..._ I cast my mind back into the new dialect whispering around us. "Elder. You know Sam is human?" Oh, this was risky. But it just might pay off. "I had feared her scent might carry too much of - of the mind-serpent-"

"It glimmers within her." Was that sympathy in the elder's voice? "But her spirit holds her body, and is not overshadowed. Taken from Gaia she was, of Gaia she is." She thumped her staff on the ground. "I am River, Honored Grandmother of Fang Mountain. You are Daniel, who may be distant kin. Why would a cub of ours travel the star-road, shrouded in the scent of Enemy?"

I let out a breath I hadn't realized I was holding. _Okay. I can do this._ "Many thousands of years ago, the star-road on the soil of Gaia was buried..."

---------------

Translations and info:

_Ib-seshatai_ - "Heart-reader"; empath. Also used by the Goa'uld to refer to humans with other extraordinary capabilities.

_Mikta_ - O'Neill was referred to as a "pain in the _mikta_" by the System Lords. We may not know what it is, but according to Teal'c, it's _not_ the neck.

_Ryuu_ - dragon.


	4. Chapter 4

_Hammond _

"...So the village elders have provisionally agreed to wait and see if Jack is dangerous or not," Daniel Jackson reported over the radio. "But they're pretty determined that he's not human."

I scowled at the blue shimmer of the event horizon, briefly considering the thin link of radio waves and MALP radio relay that bound us to the Cerberus encampment light-years and miles away. "How determined, Dr. Jackson?"

"They won't let the kids near me, all the single girls and a couple of the guys find an elsewhere to be, and I keep getting spears _accidentally_ poked my way," the colonel himself reported, aggrieved. "Not that I mind the guys taking off, but it's kind of hard on the nerves being eyed like a loose saber-tooth tiger."

I suppressed a sudden, petty desire to pound my head against a control console. It'd feel so good when I stopped. SG-1's first contact position had brought us all kinds of problems; Teal'c as former Jaffa, Carter as a woman, even Daniel as a non-warrior type of problems. But I believe this was the first time we'd had to deal with off-worlders assuming the 2IC of Stargate Command was an alien out of their community's worst nightmares. "And have you determined why they believe you're an Ancient, Colonel?"

"He gives them a creepy feeling, General," Dr. Enomouto spoke up.

"Give you a creepy feeling in a minute, Doc," Jack grumbled.

"Too late," Enomouto quipped.

"It could be literally true, Sir," Major Carter put in. "My magnetic detection equipment isn't nearly as sensitive as I would like, so I can't prove it here - but if they're using the same means of perception we've seen in some other individuals, Colonel O'Neill might simply show up as abnormal in comparison."

Some other individuals. I hid a grimace, all too aware of the possible NID ears that comment was meant to elude.

"Perhaps."

I lifted a brow, envisioning the subtle disapproval that would be on a Jaffa's stoic face. "Teal'c?"

"Anise was able to detect an ib-seshatai after over two thousand years of believing them extinct," Teal'c observed. "We should not assume the people of Cerberus have lesser abilities."

"But the Colonel's not an Ancient!" Carter protested.

"Do we know that for sure?" Daniel put in.

"Daniel..." O'Neill groaned.

"Jack, just - listen, all right? We don't know _what_ the Ancients are. Or were. And I'm not saying you are an Ancient, exactly."

"Sure sounded like," my 2IC grumbled.

"I think he means look at the situation, Sir," Major Carter put in. "Everything we've seen here suggests the Ancients were involved in large-scale genetic manipulation. We do it today, to get human insulin and growth hormones and other medical products. What if they didn't just create changelings from human and animal DNA? What if, thousands of years ago, they spliced some of their own DNA into certain human experimental subjects?"

"I do not like the sound of that, Carter."

"Dislike it on your own time, Colonel," I said briskly. Not that I liked it any better than he did, but at least he didn't have an idiosyncratic reaction to magnetic fields the NID could jump on as a reason to drag him off to Area 51. "What evidence do you have?"

"We won't be able to take tissue samples until they trust us a lot more, Sir," the major reported. "But simply from observing the variety of phenotypes in the population, and putting that together with the origin story Daniel translated, plus some of the comments Glimmer made-"

"Glimmer?" I inquired.

"Part of our welcome wagon," Jack said lightly. "Think she's got a crush on Benkai, here."

"Oh kami, I hope not," Enomouto breathed.

"Oh come on, Benkai. She's cute. I grant you the claws are a bit much-"

"Claws, hair, build - Colonel, she's probably one of their full-blood changelings," Enomouto broke in. "If Earth-born legends are even half right, she could break us all up like kindling and still have the get up and go to shatter half a mountain, before breakfast. So forgive me if I'm not exactly interested in casual flirting."

This was going nowhere fast. "Full-blood?" I asked deliberately.

"From what we've heard, it sounds as though our legend of Echidna may have combined several different Ancient labs," Dr. Jackson reported. "The people of Fang Mountain believe there were many 'spawning grounds'; one here, at least one on 'another star', and a bunch back on 'the soil of Gaia'."

"Several labs," I echoed hollowly.

"It'd make sense, Sir," Major Carter agreed. "If they were following good scientific technique, different labs might well be working on different... avenues of experimental research." I could hear her swallow. "Which might explain why there are a lot of different monster legends on Earth. It'd definitely explain why they kept a control group of regular humans here on Cerberus along with their research subjects."

"Which screwed them big-time," Jack smirked.

"If River's legends are right, their captors used forcefields and physical barriers to keep the groups of experimental subjects separated, but they forgot to keep them _isolated,_" Daniel took up the story grimly. "They call her Spirit, not Psyche - but she really did throw Cerberus part of her rations, after he was injured by some of the less... intelligent results caged with him."

"Beauty and the Beast with furry scales," Jack said wryly. "Who'd have thought?"

"It sounds like she maybe spent years trying to get through whatever they did to him," Dr. Enomouto put in. "How to walk again, how to talk again - even the idea that words meant something besides hissing at a bad thing to make it go away."

"Long story very short, General, it sounds like they figured out the enclosures were customized," Daniel went on. "Changeling psychic abilities wouldn't work on their locks. Barely reached outside their own cells; the Ancients figured out that magnetic vulnerability, too. And the ordinary humans - those 'of Gaia' - physically couldn't get to the locks on their enclosures."

"But if they switched..." I murmured.

"It almost killed Cerberus, but he got Spirit's cell open," Dr. Jackson said soberly. "She and her people carried him out."

"And unlatched just about every other cage they could along the way, sounds like," Colonel O'Neill said with dry satisfaction. "Mass chaos."

"Unfortunately, they needed it," Major Carter stated. "Even allowing for a few thousand years of exaggeration, Sir, it doesn't sound like the researchers took the escape well."

"Hence our destroyed UAV," I filled in.

"Actually, that... um... appears to have been a teenage dare. Sir."

"Or whatever the dragon equivalent is," Jack quipped.

I would _not_ allow my jaw to drop to the control room floor. "That was a _teenager?_"

"Honored Grandmother River identified him as Flies-With-Hail," Teal'c stated. "This does not appear to be a meritorious name."

"It means he's an idiot, Teal'c," Jack filled in.

"Indeed."

"We'll mark it down as loss due to initial cultural misunderstanding," I sighed. "Speaking of which, Dr. Jackson..."

"They seem to believe we didn't scare them on purpose, but they're still pretty spooked," Daniel reported. "They weren't sure if the UAV was Ancient tech or some new kind of Goa'uld device. They're still not talking much, but some of the metal pieces they've recycled around here, it looks like one or two System Lords have sent exploratory probes, like the one Apophis dropped on the SGC, sometime in the past centuries. And... maybe a few Jaffa, too."

"Disassembled headpiece armor on the walls as decoration is a pretty good clue," Dr. Enomouto agreed.

"That was armor?" Jack said skeptically. "Enomouto. It was bits of metal. Nice abstract, but-"

There was a silence.

"Come on, Doc. The only way that could've been armor was if somebody shredded it like Swiss cheese!"

More silence.

"Okay, okay, I get it... though if these dragons can do _that,_ I'm kind of wondering why they keep humans around at all. Spirit left a good impression on Cerberus' offspring, maybe - but in my experience? Gratitude like that tends to wear pretty thin after a generation or two."

I could've sworn I heard a muffled groan from Dr. Enomouto. Not to mention what sounded like a certain archaeologist counting to ten in Ancient Egyptian.

"Sir," Major Carter sighed. "I think Daniel and Ben are trying to say that the dragons _are_ the people."

"Twenty-foot dragon. Six-foot person. Do I have to get into conservation of mass and energy with an astrophysicist?"

"No, sir, but-"

"Ah! Genetic engineering, Carter. Whoever did this was fiddling with people and animals. So we've got some weird people, and some weird animals. And maybe this Spirit made friends with one of the brighter weird animals, maybe even human-intelligent, and tamed it. And _maybe_ the descendants on both sides decided to keep up the truce. But talking to animals, and people turning into animals - not to mention animals turning into people, much less a pretty lady deciding to pair off with something that's not always walking on two legs - it's a nice bedtime story, Major, but we know it doesn't happen." A pause. "Daniel?"

"'Wait by the river long enough, and the bodies of your enemies will float by.'"

"And you're quoting dead Chinese guys at me why?"

"You ask, we tell you, you don't believe us - fine," Dr. Enomouto shrugged. "Dr. Jackson? Do you think you could help me talk some more to that smith, Charcoal? I'd heard bronze edges could beat steel six ways from Sunday, but this is the first time I've really gotten a good living example-"

"Dr. Enomouto," Colonel O'Neill cut in coldly. "You're here on a provisional basis."

"Yes, I am."

Back in the control room, I sat up straight. I'd heard that quiet calm before. Though not from a linguist.

"Good. Now that we've got that straight... These people might be our allies, they might know where we can find this lab, and we are definitely not going to insult them by even _implying_ some of their ancestors might have had inappropriate relations with _experimental animals._ Are we clear?"

"Crystal."

I heard the smoldering fury in that taut calm, and bit back the impulse to order them all back through the 'Gate, now. Colonel O'Neill was the commander on the ground. If he thought he had the situation under control, I had to trust his judgement.

"Do you have a _problem,_ Enomouto?"

"Jack." Daniel's voice was quiet. Warning.

"You don't get involved in command, Danny."

"This isn't command. This is a difference in cultural definitions." Daniel drew a deep breath. "Look, Ben and I are here partly because we're experts in mythology. In fairy tales. And the funny thing about a lot of ancient fairy tales? There isn't a really clear distinction between what's a human, and what's an animal. If Dr. Enomouto is making an appropriate reference to these people's origin story, to the fact that they _believe_ they're descended from Spirit and Cerberus, then he's not being insulting. We'd be more insulting if we told them they _weren't_ dragons."

"You've got to be kidding me."

"You got Irish in your family?" Benkai put in. "Back at U of T, I knew a guy who swore his family was descended from selkies. Webbed fingers proved it, you see."

"Where I come from, Dr. Enomouto, we call people like that nuts."

"Right," Benkai said dryly. "Like alien abductees."

"The Goa'uld haven't snatched anybody off this planet in centuries, Enomouto."

"Who said Goa'uld?" our new linguist countered. "Every description I've read is a pretty close match for an Asgaard."

"That's _enough_." A shift in voice, but not an ounce of compromise. "General, we're going to talk to these people some more, see if they're willing to invite SG-9 to come back for more diplomatic work. If they're hiding what we think they're hiding here, I want the SGC to have the best chance of getting our hands on it. Legitimately. Which means we go slow."

"Agreed," I said neutrally. "We'll contact you on schedule." The radio clicked off, and the event horizon vanished into empty air. Only then did I sigh, and rub at the headache with my knuckles.

The technicians were mercifully silent.

Which only added to my unease. If _they_ could see we had a problem...

I headed for my office, trying to figure out exactly what the problem was. There had to be some common element. Something that tied together the Tok'ra, and ib-seshatai, and this apparent experiment by the Ancients, into one massive knot that seemed to cut off a very good colonel's ability to think.

But what?

---------------

_Dr. John Baird_

"They're not human."

"Dr. Baird." Seated behind his office desk, General Hammond raised an eyebrow at me.

"They look human, but in the cultural or genetic box, they check 'Other'."

The other brow went up.

"It's just a guess," I admitted, flipping through the paperwork I'd brought along in a hurry when the general called. So much for my latest treatment session; I just hoped rescheduling my follow-up on one of the 'Gate guard team wouldn't go over too badly. "You asked me to look over SG-1's prior mission reports to figure out why you were losing unit cohesion, right? That's one thing that comes up, over and over, right from the start. Altair, synthetic bodies, memory replication - even though the 'other O'Neill' was basically himself, the colonel still wanted him removed, as in _dead,_ rather than leave him as a security risk. The way Major Carter was treated after Jolinar jumped her, when you'd already met that Cimmerian healer Kendra and _knew_ the host was still in there. His flat-out _no_ to the Tok'ra, starting out, when they asked for a host. Kidnapping Merrin when he knew she was going to go through the Orbanians' Averium ceremony to, and I quote, 'get her brain sucked out'. Should I go on?"

"I think those are sufficient examples, Dr. Baird." The general scowled at me. "May I remind you that ultimately, in all those cases, the colonel followed proper procedure."

Key word there being _ultimately,_ I thought with a sigh. Colonel O'Neill might have brought Merrin back, but the protests he'd lodged were loud, visible, and formally recorded. Whereas Dr. Jackson's quietly submitted request that more thorough cultural evaluations be done before any exchange of technology took place - well, that apparently rated a footnote. "Sir, with all due respect, if this were about procedure, SG-1 wouldn't-" _be falling apart now_ "-have been constructed the way it was in the first place."

That got a nod. "Go on."

Not a rip-roaring commendation, but it'd have to do. "There's a couple of key factors I think are playing into this mess. First - and this one hits everybody - between the NID and the alien invasions, the whole SGC is psychologically under siege."

"I have noticed that, Doctor," Hammond said dryly. "My people are military officers. They'll do what needs to be done."

_Stay calm,_ I told myself. _There's enough free-floating anger around here already. Let that comment sit a while; he might just think about it._ "Second, when it comes to SG-1 in specific, Colonel O'Neill came here out of Special Forces. Now, I'm not an expert on Special Forces psychology; not yet. But I've been consulting with people who are, over at Fort Stewart and other places." I held up a finger. "SF guys live for adrenaline."

Hammond smiled. "God knows, SG-1 needs someone like that."

"As a first contact team? Definitely," I agreed. "SF trains bright people. People who improvise. People who can jump out of a crashing plane into a forest fire, naked, and take the time to finish their poker hand first. When it absolutely, positively, has to be destroyed overnight, and all that." I paused. "Key word there being _overnight_. Long-term, stable operations, like you're trying to make the SGC - well, they can end up being... boring." My turn to raise an eyebrow. "I, um, heard a few psychiatrist horror stories about bored SF types. Borrowed cadavers, high explosives, cars and planes relocated into ought-to-be-inaccessible areas... I got the impression COs might have heard a lot more."

From the way the color drained out of the general's face, he had.

I held up a second finger. "Survival depends on doing everything perfectly, every time. They have to control. Everything. Everyone. No room for slip-ups. No room to experiment. Definitely no room to try things that might not work." Third finger. "They are trained for short-term diplomacy with 'native forces', up to and including giving people guns and getting them back. But they're not trained for long-term; that's boring. And they're definitely not trained to handle people who are at a technological advantage; that's a situation they can't control." I let my hand fall. "And as a psychiatrist, I can tell you, as an expert, that when anybody's normal coping mechanisms are insufficient to handle the situation they find themselves in, they overcompensate with those same mechanisms on the parts of their life they think they can still handle." I waited.

"SG-1." It wasn't quite a groan.

"And since he is your 2IC, how he treats SG-1, especially Dr. Jackson, spills over into how your entire military command treats the rest of us," I said quietly.

The general gave me a level look. "Dr. Baird, may I remind you that this planet is at war? We don't have to like each other. We only have to get the job done."

"If this keeps up, we won't even get that," I said bluntly. "Sir, war or not, military or not, _nobody_ can stand this kind of strain indefinitely. It's not fair - and civilian or military, most of your people are Americans, with a high degree of attachment to 'fair'. Which is starting to boil over into pure resentment on both sides of this command, especially when you say _my people_ and only _mean_ military."

"_Dr._ Baird-" Red-faced, the general stopped himself, and thought. "Explain."

_Hammer time._ "Your people," I said levelly, "_aren't_ all military officers. You've got a pile of civilian experts here, yours truly included. They're not here because they can shoot. They're here because they've put as much time and effort and frustration into learning their specialties as your Special Forces types do for things that go boom. And they look at people like Major Fraiser, who admits herself she's not one of your better shots, and they think, _She gets respect and she's a scientist. How come I don't?_"

"Dr. Fraiser is-" Still redder, he bit off the next word. "Continue."

_Yeah, right. Shortest time for a shrink on payroll in military command... keep going._ "And on the other side, this is a military command, in a military installation, who have been told over and over again by you and your 2IC that they have to be _responsible_ for the civilians." Folder tucked into my arm, I flattened my hands on the desk. "General. I don't think anybody intended this to happen. But from what I've heard in sessions and around the water coolers, the military side of this installation has somehow gotten the idea that they're the dependable older siblings unfairly saddled by Mom and Dad with looking after the helpless Ph.D. brats. While the civilian side works its tail off for you, putting up with being treated like incompetent imbeciles, all the time being degraded by their peers outside this facility in the scientific equivalent of a medieval pillory. They're disgusted, and they have every right to be."

_"What?"_

I blink. Could it possibly be that he doesn't-?

Oh hell. He probably doesn't.

"General," I said very carefully, "Ph.D.s come out of academia. Academics respect each other by the papers they publish, the research they're doing, and the number of graduate students they teach to be respectable scientists in turn. Your scientists here can't take on grad students. They can't talk about their research. Heck, the SGC is so tightly classified they can't even publish papers in the classified journals!"

"Anyone who signs a contract here knows that coming in," Hammond argued.

"No, General, we don't," I said evenly. "We're told we're doing classified work. Other places they classify scientific work - CIA, NSA, CDC, heck, even NORAD right on top of us - there are places people can publish papers. Here, there's nothing. It's like-" God, how can I put this? "-Like taking a position in Antarctica, where you know the working conditions are going to be hell, and the rooms are always cold, and you're going to be frozen in for six months with people whose guts you actively hate. But you go, because the research is supposed to be important, and the pay is good. Only when you get there, the people in charge cut off every connection to your family, and have you making cinderblocks instead. And they treat you like you're not good enough, not _smart_ enough, for anything better."

"Dr. Jackson has never complained," the general objected.

"Dr. Jackson pretty much committed academic suicide with his crackpot theories on the pyramids being built thousands of years before the academic consensus says they were," I fired back. "Did you read that write-up you handed me on the Osiris mess? His fellow archaeologists, the people he's as accountable to as you are to your fellow generals, thought he was _dead_. Because he hadn't published." I paused. "And if they knew you had him fake scientific evidence, he really would be dead. They'd _crucify_ him."

"It was necessary to the security of this program."

"Maybe it was. But it's scientific betrayal." I sighed. "General. You can't hire ER doctors, hand them a needle full of poison, and tell them to assassinate their own children, just because they're your enemies. You're _breaking_ these people."

"You can't equate scientific papers with human lives!"

"For some of these people, those are the only children they'll ever have," I said flatly. _Let it get through, please let it..._

The general's eyes didn't change. _Damn_ it.

I let the silence drag out, then sighed. "Long story short, General - things that look human, but don't fit the colonel's definition of human, overload his weirdness tolerance. It's a natural human response. And it's natural to avoid that overload any way possible. Which is part of why he keeps sniping at the Tok'ra; annoy something enough, maybe it'll go away." I paused. "So, just what kind of experiment happened on this planet they're on right now?"

"You'll receive the pertinent details when SG-1 makes their report, Doctor." Hammond glanced toward one of the guards, who nodded and prepared to unlock the office door.

_Right,_ I thought bleakly. _After it blows up in everybody's face._

---------------

_Hannibal_

_"Anemic?" _

Standing straight as I leaned on her paper-covered table, Megumi gave me a _look._ "You heard me."

Yeah. I was just hoping I hadn't. "But - I - you-"

"Based on your test results and symptoms… Hannibal, you may not have been born a dhampire, but everything you've been through has made you so close to one that scientifically and mystically, I can't tell the difference. You need higher iron than normal, higher protein than normal - heme does help with that - and a supplemental amount of life-energies from an outside source to both support your supernatural abilities and heal the damage caused by overexposure to sunlight," the doc ticked off. "In short, you can be an idiot, act like a human, and make yourself sick enough to either die or start attacking people-"

"I won't do that!"

"-Or, you can come to terms with your condition, try to avoid sunburns, and take up supplemental blood-drinking again," Megumi went on, undaunted. "It doesn't have to be human, though I would advise that you take some once in a while to curb the worst of the hunger."

I shook my head. "You don't know-"

An elegant black brow went up. "I'm kitsune, Hannibal. I think I do know."

Right. Energy vampires. "I can quit using…."

"This isn't an _addiction,_ Hannibal. Twelve-step programs won't help." She sighed, and deliberately smoothed the irritation out of her voice. "Can you try not to hear? Not to see? Not to run, full out, when all the world is closing in on you and you _have_ to move, before you throw a punch through someone's face?"

My fingers were biting into paper. I wasn't going to shred it. Wasn't.

Even if I could feel the claws itching close to the surface, begging to be let out.

_No. Damn it, no! I don't_ care _what Frost did to me; I'm a human being, not a-_

Something quivered in the air, and Megumi sucked in a hurt breath. "Oh, no!"

"What is it?" _Like I have to ask,_ I thought wryly. _I know 'impending doom' like the back of my hand by this time._

The doc gave me a look. "Not that someone _just passing through_ needs to know-"

Cheap shot. I let it slide; aching heart or not, I might not be passing through as quick as I'd thought. After all, I still hadn't dragged any details out of Saitou about that undead he said he'd scented following him. And I _really_ don't like the thought of clearing out of someplace where undead things are following people. Even if I did think Saitou could probably hack, slash, and pick his teeth with what was left of it.

"-We've set up warning wards around… various places in the vicinity."

Aha! "Like Carter's?" I asked dryly, catching a wince from her that told me I was right. _So that's how O'Connell snuck up on me!_

"Whatever it is, it's a lot bigger than you are…." Megumi's head turned like a seeking missile, staring unfocused through walls toward one particular compass heading. "And it's at the Mountain."

---------------

_Daniel_

_"-Aaaaughhh!" _

Staring way, _way_ up at torn metal, a few sparking cables, and an improbably blue patch of sky, I absently wiggled a finger in one ear, trying to clear out the nagging alarms and the echoes of Benkai's plea to _"Put me the hell down, Glimmer, dammit!"_

Wow. I was standing in sunlight. There probably hadn't been sunlight in the 'Gateroom since… oh, the last time we had to move a 'Gate in here. Which I'd kind of missed, being out cold under Janet's annoyed needle for not taking proper post-appendectomy care of myself. This was cool….

Oh. Guns pointed at the rest of our Cerebus visitors, who'd come to get a feel for the people asking after their old stories, held by very white-faced guards. Not good. And Jack was yelling. Probably had been for some time.

"-You tell me where the hell you zapped that thing out of, lady, or I _swear_ I'll-"

River, Honored Grandmother of Fang Mountain, was giving Jack a look that said she was about one more insult away from making him eat his P-90.

And for all I knew, she could do it, too.

"Jack." I cleared my throat. "You gave Glimmer permission to do it."

One pissed-off ex-Black Ops Colonel - who looked very much like he was about to take off the _ex_ in new and gruesome ways - gave me a look that could have peeled paint. "Say _what?_"

"She said," I repeated, very patiently, "she'd like to ride the wind to meet the elders of Benkai's clan, to ask if she could solicit permission to court him." I paused. "And _you_ said, 'Gee, that's sweet. Sure, go ahead. But there's a heck of a lot of steel between us and that wind, and it'll take us a while to crank it all back, so I guess it'll just have to wait.'"

"I was being sarcastic!" He waved a hand, flinging the words off. "And I told you not to translate that."

"I didn't," I said dryly. "I could have _sworn_ I mentioned that according to legends, dragons are supposed to be able to understand any human language?"

"Yeah, fine, whatever - why'd it snatch Enomouto, and where the _hell_ did it come from?" Jack glanced over our visitors, less one. "And where'd Glimmer get to?"

Isis, give me strength.

Round-eyed, Sam cleared her throat. "Sir… I don't know how to explain it… dark matter, maybe, or extra mass moved 'sideways' from the supplementary dimensions string theory predicts, or-" She gulped. "Sir - that _was_ Glimmer."

Teal'c inclined his head.

Jack stared at them. Then at me. Then at the hole.

And that's when the swearing _really_ started.

---------------

_Benkai_

_Oh kami I'm gonna die I'm gonna_ die-

"Ah, the power of mountains… though the air is different here. So many scents of humans, of rock oil. Very odd."

Not English. Not Japanese. Though it kind of mixed up in my head as both, with a wash of scents and vibrations and postures I'd never really realized was almost as important to my clan as the words themselves. All vibrating through my bones with Glimmer's rumble, channeled down the claws tucking me up next to white and silver scales.

_Okay,_ my brain piped up in sheer terror, _I think we can chalk up "even offworld youkai understand all human languages" as fact. Which we kind of expected, right? Ki-reading, matching posture and emotional intent - if we can understand people speaking completely foreign languages well enough to know when and when not to start fights, and most of us aren't even half-youkai, stands to reason a full-blooded one could do more. Right?_ I took a look down - way, _way_ down - and gulped, jamming my eyes closed. Trees, rocks, little figures down by the big tunnel leading into the Mountain that were probably panicked guards running out of NORAD who at any moment might start shooting… nope, looking was _not_ helping. "Um… down would be nice. Really."

"So you say, my handsome one," Glimmer mused, banking into the wind. "But you fear their weapons. Are they not your allies?"

"Yeah… kind of…." Oh, I didn't even want to _think_ about what NORAD was probably screaming at General Hammond right now. I'm no military expert, but I did look up this place before I signed on. And from what I knew, the whole point of having Canadian-U.S. aerospace defenses coordinated from under Cheyenne Mountain was to cut out a lot of the need for heavy weapons to guard the base. It was under kami knew how many tons of rock, after all; short of a dead-on nuclear strike or a Goa'uld pyramid ship, what in the world could get at the place?

All of which boiled down to, NORAD was satellites and armed guards and not a whole lot else, weapons-wise. And they'd just had Godzilla's smaller cousin tear out _through_ their facility.

Right about now, foaming at the mouth was probably the _calmest_ thing they were doing.

Hmm. Put that way, dangling from dragon claws a few thousand feet up didn't look so bad-

_Zapthunk! _

…Ow?

"Who dares?"

_Zap! Zapzap! Zappow!_

Teeth bared, Glimmer coiled along the edge of a translucent red-gold shimmer in the air. A dome of ki and youki that went around and up and down and - I made a bet with myself, squirmed a little to crane my head back toward the Mountain, and won - appeared to circle the whole damn base.

…I don't even want to _think_ how much energy Kenshin and the others poured into setting this up.

_Kaoru said Kenshin was hunting again. And not just for food._ Not that he was _killing_ the bad guys around here; he wouldn't stab Ryan with that dilemma, not unless there just flat-out wasn't any other choice. But he was making sure they hurt. You can drain energy that way, too, if you know what you're doing. Not as much as a kill… but it's a hell of a lot easier on your soul.

"The ward recognizes you, but it will not let you pass." Hawk-gold eyed me, eeling through air just inside the ward's limits. "Why?"

"Because we're not as lucky as you," I dared.

Ow. Ow. _Claws,_ this lady doesn't know her own _strength_-

But at least I got her attention.

She slacked her grip a little at my choked gasp; I grabbed another lung-full of air, and sped on. "Our enemies know who we are, and where we are," I went on. _Nonspecific enough? I hope it's nonspecific enough; she'll hear if I'm lying._ "And they have stratagems that can make it past even the protections your people placed around your 'Gate. Right now I'm not with you of my own free will. The ward has to assume you might be an enemy."

All true. And all carefully avoiding what the Cerberans probably shouldn't know yet; that while youkai and hanyou might be their people or their next-door neighbors, here on Earth we were so underground some of us went our whole lives without knowing what we were. Or what we could do.

_Drink a life._ Change _a life, like Kenshin did to me, and never realize what we're doing until it's too late…._

"You… are promised to another?" Massive lids closed in a hurt blink. "We saw no sign of it in your aura, not as we did in your younger kin's."

Say what? I thought Dr. Jackson was a widower. Man, I _had_ to sit down with Kaoru. She'd give me the straight skinny on this crazy place if anyone would. "No, not really - look, can we just go down, away from the guns, and talk?"

Her mane ruffled out, happy again. "To your elders?"

"I - um - don't have any way to get Kenshin out here…." Not like I carry a cell-phone offworld. Though if the wards were going off, Kenshin ought to know something was freaky out here. Hopefully, _before_ any news choppers showed up.

"Reach and call him."

Eep. "I don't have that kind of power-"

Chuckling, she licked me.

I think my last coherent thought was _sock-dryer static from hell-_

Lights out.

---------------

_Kenshin_

_"Ki-ya!"_

Listening to Kaoru snicker under her breath as we careened off pavement onto a dirt road that would head near our goal, I covered my eyes with my hands, and sent up yet another fervent prayer: _Kami-sama, just let us get there in one, preferably unbloodied, piece._

Swords and ninjas and spell-casting gargoyles, I can well handle. Horse-less carriages? Whose insane idea was that?

Kaoru approaches driving as she does anything else, though; with humor and vigor and pure confidence that any skill can be mastered through sheer persistence. And her driving is far, far better than her cooking.

Which would have worried me far more, were it not for the pure panic gripping my soul.

_One of mine is injured. One of mine is in peril._

I could sense it; all but taste it. For one brief moment the sense of ki that was _Benkai_ had burned bright as a lighthouse - then vanished, as if clouds had shrouded it in instant night.

The wards were still holding; I could sense that much. As I could feel that whatever lurked within had stopped testing them, waiting with curiosity and… fear?

Why would something that powerful be afraid?

Pulling up in a cloud of dust, Kaoru put the car in park, and turned off the ignition. "You can look now." Her face turned more serious. "Kenshin? What is it?"

"Big," I said honestly. "And… familiar. In a way." I reached toward that sense of presence, shook my head. "I don't know, beloved. It does not taste of enemy… I hope."

We abandoned gasoline-fed steel for solid ground, glancing through the rocks and shrubs for soldiers that might have wandered off military territory in hot pursuit. At the moment, none. Whatever it was, it had the good sense or pure luck to find an out-of-the way corner outside the base itself. We'd designed the wards that way, incorporating as many hidden nooks as we could, in hopes that any enemy that might come from the Mountain would seek seclusion, and so give us the chance to freely muster forces against it if need be.

I sincerely hoped there would be no need. Beyond the sheer strength of that presence, there was something almost comforting about it….

_Chirp. Chirp. Chirp?_

Kaoru froze half a heartbeat after I did. It was - deeper. Larger. A little more drawn out than we were accustomed to hearing.

But it was _familiar._

_Not Kenji, no; but Mizuki, and Kanaye, all of our children after I reclaimed my blades…._

:_Hatchling-here. Hatchling-afraid…._:

White-faced, Kaoru bit down on a knuckle. I touched her shoulder, and drew a breath.

:_Adult-here. Hatchling-protected._:

Kaoru leaned into my rumble, relaxing in the vibration that went straight to bone. The first time I'd rumbled to Mizuki had startled us all; Sano had actually fallen back through a wall panel, yelling about crazy teenage stunts and Chinese alligators. At which point he'd had to explain to us just what an alligator was.

The closest mortal creature to a dragon in the world, apparently. And for all its deadly teeth and monstrous appearance, one of the most caring parents hatched outside humankind.

Which meant our unexpected visitor was… oh, kami.

The chirps quickened, still worried, but eager. :_Hatchling, hatchling!_:

:_Adult-here. Adult-coming._: I let out a breath, and looked at my wife. "Well-"

"I'll be careful. I'm _not_ staying behind."

I inclined my head, and set off up into the scrub, Kaoru a few steps behind to guard our retreat. Just because this visitor might not be a danger, didn't mean there wasn't something else that was.

We wove around a corner of rocks, and silver-white painted the shadows, curled protectively around a limp figure in green and black.

"Oh, poor Benkai!" Kaoru breathed.

"He's alive," I murmured, more focused on the chirping creature coiled around him, licking his cheek and hair as if she couldn't quite figure out why he wouldn't wake up. Fifteen feet from head to fur-tipped tail, silver-white fur and scales touched with hints of green, hawk-gold eyes, almost hand-like paws, a muzzle not quite lion, dog, or alligator. _A dragon. Benkai, where on earth did you find- Never mind._ "Move slowly. Let's not startle her."

_"Her?"_ Kaoru stared at me.

"Her," I agreed, gliding forward like a shadow. :_Adult-here…._:

Gold blinked at me, as if she couldn't quite believe what she was seeing. Sniffed. Blinked again, squinting.

I sighed, stifling an urge to bury my head in my hand. "Yes, young one. I _am_ this short."

The silvery mane flattened, and light shimmered from every scale-

A tall young woman in woodland plaids crouched by Benkai, gold eyes wide, white hair wafting in unfelt wind to almost brush the bronze tip of her spear.

Not a mortal woman, I knew, taking in the claws, the delicate points of ears amid flying hair, the sheer, raw sense of _power_ in her ki. Not even hanyou.

_Youkai. _

But a young one, if that near-panicked expression was to be trusted. Old enough to be past the worst of the blood-rage; barely of an age to feel the first stirrings of interest in possible mates-

Oh no.

"I didn't mean to hurt him, Elder!"

Not English, not any tongue I knew - but the meaning was clear enough. As was the shy glance toward our unconscious kitling, the gentle way her hand cupped his face. Oh, no….

"I just - he said he didn't have the power to reach you, I was only trying to help…."

Kaoru was looking from Benkai to her to me, with an expression that slid from shock to _now what?_

_How in the worlds should I know?_ But I kept the words unspoken, and moved forward carefully. "Let me see him, young warrior."

She leaned back, and I tried not to stare in shock. A youkai, yielding to one only hanyou?

_Later. See to Benkai._ I touched the pulse at his neck, confirming what ki-sense already told me. "I think you helped a little too much, young one." I gave her a wry smile. "What Benkai _meant_ was, he does not carry that much power even at his strongest. We are not the heroes of legend, who shot suns from the sky. We are only those who have survived, in a world where mortal humans rule, and magic is thought a cruel delusion."

She blanched. Kaoru moved in with soothing words, as she would for any young cub. I turned back to Benkai, fighting not to let my own face go pale. _So much youki. Benkai can't absorb it. I'm not certain_ I _could-_

Wait.

On hand cupping his face, the other touching the vest over his heart, I closed my eyes and reached inward. There was my ki, and there Benkai's frazzled energies, and there the smothering veil of fire that had meant only to sink in and soothe. A veil that still could, if there were only wells deep enough to drink its flames.

_He is blood of my blood, by chance and choice. If I can only move his ki to be - a little more-_

Like scraping channels in rock with my fingernails. But it could be done, I knew it.

And it had to be. The energy had been given, freely and without malice. It would not easily be persuaded to return to its true owner. Assuming she had even the skill to take it back. Given her youth, I doubted it. No; better to open the finest of channels this way, so that Benkai might at least gift the youki back to the earth that nurtured us all-

Something crumbled.

_This… may not have been the wisest of ideas…._

---------------

_Hannibal_

Just on general principles, panicked yelps are _never_ good.

This goes whether you're talking puppies, startled lawyers, or damn-fool idiot kids who have no idea that jumping headfirst off a bridge can get them killed. It really goes when you're talking sun-struck vampires, moonstruck were-things, and sorcerers who've just accidentally opened the Siege Perilous.

And when you're talking a scary little redhead that could fillet the best undead sushi chef ever brought over to the other side, well… you get the picture.

I beat feet past the car, up through the rocky scrub, and skidded down into a little bowl where a dark-haired lady in kendo gear had a panicked grip on a white-haired spear-woman and Kenshin was kneeling by an out-cold guy in military getup, twitching like he'd been stuck into a light socket.

Did I mention the little guy was glowing?

If I stopped to think about it, I'd never do it. So I didn't. Just let momentum carry me down, smack into the guy, breaking whatever mystical circuit he'd set up between him and Unconscious Guy.

_Ow._

Smoke rising from just about every hair on my body, I fought to open my eyes; gave it up as a lost cause. "Anybody get the number on that lightning bolt?"

"Oro…."

"Detective King?"

Ooo. Nice voice. If a little shocked. And probably spoken for. "Doc Takani… said you guys could maybe use a little backup." I waved a limp hand. "You Kaoru Kamiya?"

"Yes- Kenshin!"

My Japanese may be a little rusty - okay, a _lot_ rusty - but that whispered snarl sounded pretty much on the side of unprintable. Still aching, I cracked an eye open.

And when brain and panic-fried reflexes decided to start talking to each other again, I was on one side of the clearing while amber-eyed, cursing redhead was on the other.

Did I mention he was _still_ glowing?

Not the bright kind of glow that was Captain Marvel going heavy on the UV for unwelcome guests of the vampiric kind. More a kind of… dark red heat-shimmer, like you'd see over fireplace coals, right on the edge between light and heat.

"Um." I cleared my throat. "Himura? You in there?"

"I… believe so, _hai_…" Amber eyes closed; his breathing slowed, patterned and deliberate. Weirdly familiar.

And as his breathing came easier, and that shimmer started to fade, the singed hairs on the back of my neck stood _straight_ up. Oh yeah, familiar. Familiar as in looking in the mirror familiar, as in _the vampire wants out but I have to stay_ human, _damn it._

Didn't help that Kaoru was shivering.

But with one last sigh, Kenshin opened his eyes again; faded blue, with just sparks of amber. "That was… more than was expected, that it was."

_And just what were you expecting?_ I wanted to ask.

Later. For now- "Takani thought something might be breaking out…."

Under elegant white brows, hawk-gold narrowed in a frown. "The one who commanded said I could seek the sky."

Whoa. _Not_ English. But it kind of skipped my ears and went straight to my brain anyway. Houston, we have serious supernatural here. I shook off the nerve-prickles and sat up. That scent around her… oh, this was not shaping up to be a good day. "Don't believe I caught your name, Miss-?"

She sniffed, thumping her spear straight upright as she gave me the eye. "You may call me Glimmer."

_Apologetic to pissed-off in under sixty seconds,_ I thought wryly. _Supernatural teenager. Terrific._ "Well, you _may_ call me Hannibal," I shot back, deliberately looking away from her to the groaning guy in some kind of paramilitary gear on the ground. At least he was alive enough to groan. "Who'd you zap?"

_"Enomouto?"_ A radio dangling off Groaning Guy's vest crackled. _"Situation report, dammit! Now!"_

Yowza. Cranky military type. Could the day get any worse?

Reality check, Hannibal. You don't want to know the answer to that.

Eyes still closed, Enomouto's hand fumbled with the gear, finally clicking the right button. "Go 'way. Got a headache…."

_"Stay conscious and report!"_

"Report?" He blinked, dark eyes unfocused in a way that told me the guy had lost glasses around here somewhere. "Umm…." Enomouto looked at me, Glimmer - then saw Kenshin and Kaoru, and let out a relieved breath. "The - ah - situation's contained. Kind of."

_"Define_ contained,_"_ Cranky snapped.

"We're not moving?"

_"God save me from archaeologists and domesticated hazards - stay_ put. _And tell that dragon-lady that when I get there, she is in a_ world _of hurt."_

"You _dare_ threaten me, inhuman creature-" Glimmer snarled.

Enomouto clicked the radio off. "We'll talk it out," he told the lady. "Nobody really wants to hurt anybody, okay? He was just surprised - really, _really_ surprised-"

"When she turned into a dragon and busted out of whatever you've got going on down there?" I summed up. Dragon? Oh, hell. And what did she mean, calling Cranky Military inhuman? "No offense, but if that's the Air Force heading our way, shouldn't we be finding this nice young lady a good rock to hide under?"

"That, you might consider for yourself, Hannibal-san," Kenshin said frankly. "It is complicated, but they most likely will not harm her. And if she were to vanish, they might uproot more lives than we can mend."

"You're staying put," I pointed out.

Kaoru swallowed dryly. "They already know about us." Her shoulders stiffened, determined. "But if we pull this off right, they won't-"

"Glimmer said she was looking for my clan elders," Enomouto said in a rush.

"Meaning once they put together Kenshin and clan elder, your cover's blown big-time," I observed, finally identifying that trace of fur-scale scent around Enomouto. Not as strong as Kenshin's, but easier to pick out. Like it didn't have the power to make itself subtle. "Ouch."

Kaoru clenched a fist. "Then we're clan elders of your family, Benkai! Or - something…."

"No, no - that'll work," Enomouto nodded, eyes lighting up as he gingerly swayed to his knees. "Korea, you grabbed Great-Grandpa out of that alley, ended up adopting him - I've known about you since I was a kid…."

They started tossing cover story back and forth at lightning speed; Kenshin listened with one ear, gave me a sober look. "We are grateful for your aid, Hannibal-san, but you should move to preserve your own privacy."

"Appreciate the thought. Not much point in my taking off, though. This is NORAD." I jerked a thumb straight up. "You think they won't be able to get satellite footage of who was out here?"

Amber sparked in blue. _"Kuso." _

"Yep." I tilted my head up, listening to the merry sound of soldiers hitting a chain-link fence somewhere out of sight a hill or so over. "Besides, we're not actually _on_ the base, so I'm betting there's limits to what they can do to your average civilian bystander…." I stopped. "Which is exactly how you planned it, isn't it?"

Kenshin's grin would have made a demon keel over in fright.

"I'm never playing poker with you," I said dryly.

Steel-blue blinked, all clueless innocence. "Oro?"

Right. I shook my head, patting myself down to make sure all the smoke was out. Lot easier to pass as a hapless innocent bystander when you're not on fire.…

And I heard some of the voices climbing over that fence, and froze. No. Oh, no.

Kenshin glanced that direction as well, and gave me a sober look. "You might still have time to flee."

Yeah. Only then I'd _really_ look guilty. "She said she was an astrophysicist!"

"She is," Kenshin said dryly, lowering his voice as our welcoming committee got into regular earshot. "Just as you are a detective, _ne?_"

_Alien abductee,_ she'd said. And somebody'd thought enough of it was true to try and take her to pieces.

_"Hannibal?"_

Oh yeah. The day can _always_ get worse.

---------------

Translations and info:

_2IC_ - Second in command.

_MALP_ - a large probe on treads.

_UAV_ - flying recon probe.


	5. Chapter 5

---------------

_Jack_

This is not happening.

Forget that I can feel the thin Colorado mountain sun, smell a faint hint of burned hair, hear the rest of my team and no few of our MPs bringing up the rear as they scramble over the perimeter fence. Forget that I've already called in damage control teams to try and patch our missile doors, left General Hammond to deal with a shrieking flunky from NORAD, and had a few terse words with River - who seems to be under the sardonic impression that this is all _my_ fault - on the do's and don't's of husband-hunting on Earth. This is just… _not_ happening.

People don't turn into weird flying creatures. They just don't. People are like me, or General Hammond, or even Honored Grandmother River back in the 'Gateroom. We use tech to stab supper, we put one foot in front of the other to get around, and we need Daniel to translate when the wires get crossed. We _don't_ levitate, tear through sheet steel with claws, or understand languages we've never heard before.

Aliens, now - aliens I will grant you could do all of the above. And Glimmer's from off-planet, she's got claws and fangs and probably other weirdness we can't see. Alien is pretty much a given.

But River believes Glimmer's kind of aliens _are_ people. That the Ancients created them from her people, making monsters that only found their way back to being human part of the time through love and patience and sheer dumb luck. Monsters that River's declared are still part of her people, going back and forth between human and not like the rest of us change party outfits. Changeling, two-footed, every blend of genes in between - River's convinced they're all _people_.

And that I'm not.

Worse, River's convinced they're related to Daniel. And there is no _way_ Daniel is a shape-shifting inhuman… thing.

Himura, I could believe. Looking at Himura now, with that weird shimmer around him when I glance sideways, and those amber-flecked eyes sending goose-bumps running up and down my spine, I can pretty much take it as fact.

How the hell did he get out here so quick?

More important, how the hell did he get our dragon… lady… _whatever_ the hell she is to stop?

Backtrack, O'Neill. Enomouto you've got access to anytime. Himura and Kamiya - you know where they live. But who in the world is the longhaired joker in the trenchcoat?

And why is Sam looking like somebody zatted her one?

When in doubt, attack. "Damn it, Glimmer! I don't care how you get dates back home, you don't do it on official time!"

Glimmer went red, then wire-taut, clawed hands working on her spear-

Kaoru ran a knuckle under dragon-lady's jaw - say _what?_ - and made a weird sort of chirruping rumble. Glimmer tensed a little; then drew a breath and seemed to relax back to moderately annoyed.

Damn. So much for trying to pass off whatever the bystanders had seen as too much mountain sun.

Okay. Damage control. I switched a nasty glare to Trenchcoat. "And who the hell are you?"

"King," Longhair said; almost mellow, if you weren't watching that wry glint of brown eyes behind the dark glasses. Midwest accent… Milwaukee? "Hannibal King." And then the bastard waved. "Hi, Sam. How's the day job?"

I blinked. Dust. Right. And then I shot a glance at Carter, not at all helped by overhearing Daniel's choked _snrk_ of a laugh. "You _know_ this guy?"

"Um…."

Okay, why is my 2IC looking anywhere but me? She couldn't have… he couldn't have… damn it, Teal'c will tear that grinning idiot into itty, bitty pieces. And I'll stomp on them. _Nobody_ lays a hand on my major she doesn't want there. "You're trespassing on government property-"

"Not a chance," King said dryly. "Over there, is government property. Over here is - well, not much. Which is kind of a letdown. I was looking for the Garden of the Gods. You know, Siamese Twins, Balancing Rock, that whole schtick? What have people got against street signs around here? Last time I saw something with that many bullet holes in it, the SFPD were making origami out of used targets again."

"You're about twenty miles off course," I said flatly, sneaking a glance at the angle of the sun. 'Gate-lag blew time zones to little smithereens, but I was guessing it was about two in the afternoon. Right. Trenchcoat, casual suit, and shoes made for pounding the pavements. And he expected people to believe he was out for a day hike?

Hannibal shrugged. "So, you've never gotten lost?"

"Only about every third planet," Daniel muttered under his breath.

…Oh, I am _so_ going to get him for that one.

Later. For now, I had a dragon-lady to chew out. "You." I nodded at Glimmer jerked a thumb back toward our escorts. "Inside. We're going to have a little talk."

Hawk-gold blinked, her jaw dropping. Good. Maybe a little of how serious this was had gotten through-

And she was _snarling,_ flesh fluxing in a white shimmer that bled a bronze spear-point into tips of claws-

"No shooting. No shooting!" Daniel was yelling at our guys, putting himself in harm's way. _Again._

Same time, Kenshin and Kaoru latched onto Glimmer, melting flesh or not, yammering in quick Japanese. Enomouto had jumped into the mess with Daniel, talking a mile a minute about misunderstanding, breach of customs, and not shooting treaties to hell. And King-

King dove out of the line of fire with Sam, putting himself between her and snarling thing. "Forget the gun! You'll just piss her off!"

"You don't understand!" Sam bit out, drawing and aiming like the rest of us sane people.

"I know!" King shot back; letting her go, no matter how much the look on his face said he wanted to put my major over his shoulder and beat feet out of here. "I get that! But a barking dog ain't biting, right?"

Hate to admit it, but the guy had a point. Not that any of us lowered our weapons. "Daniel!"

A muscle worked in my archaeologist's jaw. "Jack, _shut up._"

Okay, now that was too far-

"Right now, Kenshin's trying to talk her out of _killing_ you."

Say what?

"Making good arguments, too," Enomouto said breathlessly. "Man, I just hope youkai and changeling ideas about what's proper aren't too far off. We've got who knows how many centuries of divergent cultural evolution working here…."

"_Can_ he talk her out of it?" Daniel asked bluntly.

Enomouto waggled a hand back and forth. "If she were older, maybe not. But so far she's treating him as an elder, meaning she's probably got to listen to what he says. Don't know if that'll stop her, but-" He shook his head. "Longer we keep her talking, more likely it is she won't kill anyone."

"What is the nature of the misunderstanding?" Teal'c rumbled darkly.

Daniel raised an eyebrow. Enomouto winced. "Well, if my family stories are right, and given what I've seen around Uncle Kenshin they are, youkai and hanyou are a lot more… literal than regular people."

"_Uncle_ Kenshin?" I echoed. Not happy. Not at all.

The linguist rubbed at what was probably the start of a massive headache. "Oh, I could've gone forever without bringing this up… long story short? Back in 1894, Kenshin needed to - um - _borrow_ somebody who spoke Korean."

If it weren't for the snarling in front of us, that would have fixed every SGC eye on the guy. "Borrow?" Carter said cautiously.

"Family stories have always said it was pretty messy," Enomouto admitted. "Swords and guns and youki flying around all over the place. When the dust settled, Kenshin found out he'd kind of… accidentally adopted my family."

"You want to clear up how you can _accidentally_ adopt somebody, Enomouto?" I said dryly.

"Maybe later," the linguist sighed. "Upshot is, I kind of grew up knowing about… strange things. And watching some pretty weird behavior. At least, weird by so-called 'normal' standards. To hanyou, it's just how they are."

"Which explains?" I nodded toward the quieter snarls. Glimmer was almost back to human shape, a kendo instructor hanging on each arm. And King hadn't so much as turned a hair. Who was this guy?

"Well…" Enomouto drew a deep breath, and glanced aside. "Outside of the bad temper and occasional claws? Ordinary social skills are kind of… _not_ their best thing."

"But Kenshin-" Daniel spread empty hands.

"Kenshin's had a long, long, _long_ long long, long time, to practice." Enomouto rubbed the back of his neck. "Colonel. I know what it looked like. But Glimmer _didn't_ mean to hurt me, she _did_ say she was sorry, and she _thought_ you meant what you said, back in… where we were," he finished cautiously, gaze not quite flicking toward King. "For a youkai, she's being pretty calm and considerate."

"Hello? Claws? Fangs? Murder threats?" I pointed out.

"You breaking your word?" Enomouto shot back. "She _asked_ you for permission to talk to my elders, Colonel. You _gave_ it to her. Now you want to drag her away from them? That makes you a liar. And maybe I haven't met that many youkai, but hanyou forgive somebody trying to _kill_ them before they forgive somebody lying to them."

"That's insane!"

"Actually, sir… that could make sense," Sam said reluctantly. "If their senses are such that they always have an accurate reading of other people's emotional states-"

"Between the ki sense, and a lot of them have _much_ better noses than you and me - take that as a given," Enomouto stuck in.

"-Then the mismatch between spoken word and body language would be glaringly obvious," Sam went on, wincing.

Still watching and listening to the mess across the clearing, Daniel nodded. "And how do you feel when somebody like - oh, say, Maybourne? - lies to your face. And you know it."

How do I _feel?_ That NID slime, how dumb does he think I am? I ought to-

…Kill him.

Oh, shit.

But I'm not like Maybourne. Maybourne is scum. The kind of guy who makes you ashamed to be a human being. A guy who'd dissect Teal'c just to see what made him tick, easy as he would a-

Lab rat.

_NIMH rats. Experimental animals who - escaped…._

No. I'm _not_ like that. Even when I went undercover in the NID's happy little tech-stealing group, I was never like that.

Only… if the mission had called for it, if I'd _had_ to, to bring them down and keep Earth in the Tok'ra-Asgaard alliance….

Forget it. I'm not like Maybourne. Never have been, never will be. But assuming Glimmer's young and - admit it, Jack - scared silly enough dealing with us weirdo off-worlders to think I am…. "What kind of arguments get through?"

Daniel cleared his throat. "That it's rude to kill in someone else's territory."

No way. This is _military_ turf-

Only, no, it's not, isn't it? Oh, I could string Himura up by his _toes_ for this one. Easy.

With one vicious word, Glimmer shook them off. Stalked away, still shaking-mad. Drew her fist back, and _punched_-

_Empty air? Lady-_

-Air that rippled and sparked at the point of impact, green and gold and every shade of fire, throwing flesh and bone back as hard as if she'd hit concrete. Glimmer winced, shaking out her hand.

"Barrier," Enomouto said to my dropped jaw. "It's what we ran into on the way out. Long as Kenshin's standing, she's not going anywhere." He gave me a look. "So could we please, _please_ not have any shooting?"

"Bio-electric?" Sam pounced.

"Hey, I'm a linguist, not a biophysicist," Enomouto spread empty hands. "I know it works. I don't know how."

"Forget why it works. Why is it _there?_" I grumped.

"Youkai and hanyou know how to fight youkai and hanyou," he shrugged. "Don't ask me why they decided to throw a ward around this place to start with-"

"Gaki," Kenshin tossed into the conversation.

"Erk…?" Enomouto's eyes bugged, and he shuddered. "Um. Stomped gaki?"

"Oh yeah," Kaoru grinned.

And is it my imagination, or did King flinch a little too? Not to mention, for a guy I know has industrial-class snark ready and waiting to cut loose, he's being awful quiet.

Which is doing my nerves no good whatsoever.

Whatever my opinion of his lack of judgement in coming anywhere near my major, the fact remains that the annoying wonder that is snark is not indulged in by the dim of wit. I should know; I get Daniel, Sam, and even the occasional verbal jolt from Teal'c to prove it. It takes skill, smarts, and no little observation of human nature to sharpen sarcasm to a razor edge. And when anybody that smart and observant _shuts up_ - Houston, it's time to double-check the oxygen and emergency eject, 'cause there is gonna be a Problem.

In this case, an observant civilian who looks like he's been around the block more times than most of the SGC has been through the 'Gate, who's listening to words like _youkai_ and _gaki_ and _dragon_ with just a nod and a frown.

Like he's heard them before.

Like he's not only heard them, but walked right into the breathing, snarling examples. _And_ walked back out alive.

Which means that the reason he's so _quiet_ is, he's waiting for us to fill in the details….

I _don't_ think so.

"Mr. King." I nodded, semi-civil. "You want to step over here and let them have their little family discussion in private?"

"Sure," Hannibal shrugged, moving our way. "Long as you think nobody's gonna turn up allergic all of a sudden."

"Um, allergic?" Daniel asked warily. I saw his hand twitch toward the pocket where he kept his Janet-issue antihistamines.

"Yeah. Itchy fingers," King deadpanned. "Real pain."

Itchy _trigger_ fingers, that was. Uh-huh. "I take it you have a lead allergy," I quipped back.

"Doesn't everybody?" King glanced Sam's way, and ducked his head a little. "Sorry I don't have coffee. You look like you could use some."

"Actually, I think a caffeine jolt is the last thing my nerves need right now," my 2IC admitted. "Hannibal, why… I mean, you… I mean-" she waved a hand helplessly at the impossibility on the other side of the clearing. "She was a-"

"Dragon?" King filled in. "Yeah. Noticed. So?"

_"So?"_ Sam sputtered.

"She's not trying to eat me, and she seems to be open to reason. I'll take it. Trust me, I've run into worse."

"Worse?" Sam said faintly.

King let out a slow breath. "Some years back, I wound up taking a case in Wisconsin, poking into cattle mutilations. Couldn't find any real suspects, but following the blood trail led me to a lodge where a writer was hanging out. Douglas Royce. Good guy. Didn't know that at the time, though; just knew I'd found a guy with a wall-full of Indian totems and research on similar messes… only those were over a century or so old. He seemed good for a possible perp. So the next night I hung around the pastures nearby, hoping to catch whoever it was in the act. Only it wasn't a who. It was a what." King gave me a look. "And Royce had been looking for it same as I was. Which was lucky for both of us. 'Cause when that pair showed up, wanting a taste of human instead of beef…." He shrugged. "Called themselves the _children of the night._ Shape-shifters. Vanished into shadow like _that._" He snapped his fingers. "And we only beat 'em 'cause they weren't expecting their meal to fight back."

Uh-huh. I can hear somebody glossing over the details a mile away. But King was talking, at least. Which sure beat him _listening_.

"Doug an' I tracked down their lair. Found out they'd cut and run, leaving all kinds of parchments and hoodoo stuff behind. Mutilations stopped, farmers were happy, sheriff was happy… me, I wasn't happy. But tracking down things that don't exist doesn't exactly keep a roof over your head, you know? I had to get back to work. Doug, though… he got hooked on the chase. We kept in touch, couple years later I got a cable saying he was onto something-" Hannibal's fists clenched. "An' before I could get back, he was dead. Burned to ashes on a street in Greenwich Village."

Ow. I gave Sam the eyebrow: _Keep him talking, Carter._

"The children of the night?" Sam guessed.

"Oh yeah. Bigger and badder. I found 'em - or you could say, they found _me_ - but lucky for me, I wasn't alone when I did. An' just 'cause they were supernatural, didn't make 'em smart. They'd wound up making a bargain with something even nastier than they were, and when it looked like they were going to break it, whatever was powering them burned _them_ to ash. Just smoke and feathers." King shrugged, faking casual. "So between cases, I read up on this stuff. Wouldn't exactly call myself an expert, but by this time I think I've got a pretty good handle on what's safe, what's annoying, and what wants to pick its teeth with you." He nodded toward Glimmer. "Vibe I'm getting off her is, good kid with a temper."

"Oh yeah?" I stuck in. "And what kind of vibe do you get off Himura?"

"Don't piss him off," Hannibal said dryly.

"You believe he is more powerful than Glimmer?" Teal'c inquired, brow almost disappearing under the edge of his outside-the-Mountain black knit cap.

"More powerful, heck. He's _meaner_."

…Which was pretty much _my_ take on the situation, darn it. Glimmer might wind my nerves up so they made violin strings look like bowls of jelly, but Enomouto was right: she hadn't actually _hurt_ anybody. Whereas Kenshin-

Well. Even when you have experts like Carter strangling info out of the computer, historical records on legendary assassins aren't exactly what you'd call accurate. But general consensus seems to put Hitokiri Battousai's kills at over a thousand, and even a _conservative_ estimate puts the number as somewhere in the hundreds over the course of five years. Put that in perspective? Carlos Hathcock, AKA White Feather, known as one of the best snipers of Vietnam or ever, had ninety-three confirmed kills.

And as somebody once quoted Ernest Hemingway to Hathcock, after the war, _"Certainly there is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and like it, never really care for anything else thereafter."_

Peaceful kendo instructor, my effin' _mikta_.

---------------

_Janet_

I leaned one hand on the briefing table as people finally got settled, watching Colonel O'Neill drum his fingers, Sam twist a pen as she considered her open laptop, and Daniel flipping through his notes with a frown of concentration. Dr. Enomouto and Teal'c were both quiet in their own ways; the younger linguist making a note here and there, Teal'c just patiently waiting. And General Hammond….

General Hammond looked like he didn't know _who_ ordered this day, but if he ever found out, he'd rip off their insignia and make them eat it.

Ouch.

John Baird looks after a part of people I tend to steer clear of; give me physical blindness I might cure any day, instead of hysterical blindness where the circuits are running but the processor is having a nervous fit. But you can't cut the mind from the body, much as I might like to, so when I've got a patient with a physical complaint that might influence counseling, and it's not violating confidentiality, I tell him. And when Dr. Baird comes to me with info on the psychological aspects behind what might show up in my infirmary next, I listen.

Not to mention, the guy badly needed to vent at _somebody,_ or he was going to have to turn _himself_ in for counseling.

Military-civilian morale split. Damn. I hadn't even realized….

I'm trying not to beat myself up too badly. I may get called in as a biology pinch-hitter, but I'm a medical doctor first and foremost. Treating people is way ahead of papers in my list of priorities. And the kind of papers I write up _can_ get through the classified-info filter. Sometimes. The fact that Daniel's can't… well, our archaeologist usually saves his complaints for the mean nasty weapon of the week he's been hit with. Zats. Staff weapons. Weird alien viruses. And so on.

I still think both sides of this mess share the blame. General Hammond's doing what he's supposed to do: lead and protect a military installation as it carries out its mission. That part of its mission has accumulated civilians over the years isn't his fault.

But it _is_ his responsibility. And right now, John isn't sure the general even knows that responsibility exists.

I am sure. Not that I know how to explain it to Dr. Baird. The general is in command of the SGC. Whatever he may think or know about Colonel O'Neill's problems, he has to defend the actions of his subordinates, and he cannot act as if he has anything less than confidence in his 2IC. Not in front of people outside his chain of command.

…Which leads us right back to where we started.

Either the civilians are part of the SGC, or they aren't. Either General Hammond has authority over them, or he doesn't. We need some _clarity_ here, people.

Only with the NID and Area 51 and various senators - no, Kinsey isn't our only problem, just the most vocal one - stirring up the pot, we're not going to get it.

Take a step back, Janet. SGC command messes are going to have to wait. Right now, we've got a shaky off-world alliance to trade notes on, hoping somebody will come up with a brainstorm on how to strengthen ties with the people we just sent back through the 'Gate, who may have piles of information we want but don't _need_ anything from us. Well, outside of wanting Daniel and Benkai to come back and tell them about Earth legends. Hey, it's a start. And a lot better footing than I honestly thought we'd get, after that mess with Glimmer.

I still wish I'd had a chance to examine her. A creature that can actually change shape… but I know when to squash my curiosity. We needed trust first. Medical data later. And given what I've heard happened, trust was going to be very tricky to pull off.

I'd considered showing up with a box of clean-wipes, but I doubted anyone would take the suggestion that they might have egg on their faces well. Which would ruin all the diplomatic work Daniel's managed to pull off so far. Bad idea.

At least Jacob and the other Tok'ra had been out watching the new Star Wars movie, and missed most of the chaos. Their MP escorts say they hedged like heck and blamed traffic for the delays in getting back. Probably fooled Sermane, may have fooled Jacob, likely didn't fool Judith. Oh well. Scuttlebutt says the missile doors are patched, and we _might_ even have the 'Gateroom cleaned up by the time they leave. I hope.

Now, as long as none of them looks up….

"You say this… syllabary that you found, is a key factor, Dr. Jackson?"

I yanked my wandering attention back to the general's face, glanced away just enough to catch Daniel's frown. Not a frustrated frown, more a "I think I have something and I don't like it one little bit" kind of crinkle to his eyes. "The fact that it exists, and what it seems to be based on, goes a long way toward substantiating the Cerberans' story," Daniel said frankly. "If contact between the two groups had been on a voluntary basis, I'd expect to find it based on words like _friend_ and _name_ and _where do you come from?_ Simple words. Simple concepts. The basics, from two intelligent associations trying to hammer out a compromise method of communications. But we haven't. Instead, there are things we think mean genetics, and control group, and-" he grimaced, "-test subject."

"And so far as we can determine, none of that lies within the villagers' current level of technology," Sam put in frankly.

"It'd be like Australian Aborigines trying to translate space shuttle diagrams," Daniel nodded. "General, there's just no way anyone in a subsistence society would expend that much energy just for fun. They _believe_ their ancestors were experimented on by the Ancients. I think we should take that belief as fact."

"And their belief that Colonel O'Neill is an Ancient?" The general raised a skeptical brow.

"I asked Kenshin about that," Benkai spoke up. "No, not _exactly_ like that," he added, shaking his head, as Jack shot him a deadly look. "I just told him something about the colonel was ticking Glimmer off - which he could see, thank you very much - and asked him if he knew anything about O'Neill that would upset a youkai." Benkai frowned. "He says your ki's… _stiff,_ was the way he put it. Youkai and hanyou auras - they kind of flex. Dip into the energies around them. Glimmer's youki does that in a big way; when you go after her, you're not just fighting her, you're fighting all the energy around her. But your ki's not like that, Colonel. Your energies, everything that makes you _you_, are really tied to you." He shrugged. "Kenshin's met a few other people like that before. He says they kind of give him an uneasy feeling, and they can't be adopted, but outside of that, they seem to be just like everybody else."

"Adopted?" Jack said wryly.

"…Um."

"Dr. Enomouto," Hammond said levelly.

"Kenshin thinks of us as family," Benkai said matter-of-factly.

"And?" Jack asked.

"And what?" Benkai gave us a near Daniel-grade Innocent Look. "My family's been mixed up with a hanyou swordsman who's got all the curiosity of a nine-tailed kitsune for over a century, and you think there _has_ to be an _and?_ Isn't that enough?"

I didn't even have to trade a glance with Jack and Sam to hear their silent _yeah, right._ But Daniel wasn't poking at the subtly obvious evasion there, so Daniel must know something. And if it were important, Daniel would tell us. Since he hasn't, it's probably just embarrassing.

Which is all too plausible. I have no idea what it was like for Benkai to grow up with "Uncle Kenshin" in his life, but given how much havoc a certain redheaded ex-assassin has wreaked on SG-1 without even _trying,_ I'm guessing it must be kind of like having a friendly tornado drop by for the holidays.

The same friendly tornado who - I suspect - is going to be critically involved in helping us maintain relations with the Cerberans. Because River is apparently only still willing to talk to us because Glimmer wants to talk to Benkai, and Daniel thinks their customs make it important for the whole family, elders and all, to get involved when two people start negotiating potential relationships….

Is there water in here? Because I have a sudden sinking feeling.

"And Hajime Saitou?" Teal'c asked.

Benkai blinked. Paled. "You, um, know about Saitou?"

"Our sparring was most… enlightening."

"Saitou's _here?_" Benkai turned a muddy shade of pale. "Ah… if anybody needs me, I'm going to be hiding in a closet somewhere…."

"Dr. Enomouto," Hammond said severely.

"General, do the words _homicidal ex-samurai_ ring a bell?" Benkai said faintly. "Kenshin is nice. Polite. Mostly sane. Saitou Hajime is - not." He sank back in his chair, staring into what had to be a host of unpleasant future scenarios. "Oh, boy…."

"He gave us a prescription for Jack," Daniel said, brows drawing down with worry.

"Huh." Benkai mulled that, gaining a little color back. Shook his head. "It'll probably work. If he didn't want to help, he'd just tell you to go hang yourself."

"I suspect it will work," I said bluntly. "In fact, Colonel, I can all but guarantee it. The blood sample I took after you got back from Cerberus had a small but measurable drop in nucleated RBCs and other cells that responded to magnetic fields. Just what I'd expect from your spleen clearing out old blood cells. The two-week rest prescription ought to do it. I don't know about the cleansing ceremony, but I doubt it could hurt."

"Cleansing?" Benkai choked. "He's got what? How-"

"The colonel is AB negative," I said matter-of-factly.

Benkai's face thumped into his hands. He drew in a deep breath through his nose, let it sigh out. "Kenshin. Trouble. Magnet. Iron filings. _Kami-sama_…."

"So in essence, we have enough evidence to justify the theory that the Ancients may indeed have spliced their own DNA into some human populations," I went on, giving the poor young man a chance to recover his nerve. I'd had a hard enough time dealing with SG-1 inspired chaos during my own first few encounters with them - some near-disasters with the Touched virus sprang to mind, and if I'd only told Daniel to ignore the chaos enough to stay on his darn antihistamines… well. Add in a little touchy family history, and Benkai had to be wishing the floor would open up and swallow him. "Which would explain the colonel's… _interesting_ encounters with certain Ancient technology." Interesting, as in old Chinese curse. I never, ever want to stand helplessly by again while one of my patients almost dies from a database downloaded into their brain.

"It would be intriguing to learn if the Asgaard know of this," Teal'c mused.

_Yes it would,_ I mused, trying to keep a sudden dark scowl off my own face. If they did, and if the Ancients really had been their allies….

It might explain why the Asgaard liked the colonel. Gave him leeway the rest of us humans couldn't get away with. Put him in charge of negotiating with the Goa'uld at that little Treaty conference of theirs, when they knew darn well the human leading the SGC was General Hammond. Asked _him_ to investigate the off-world tech thefts - and didn't trust any of the rest of his team.

Especially Daniel.

Daniel, who - if everything we've put together is right - is just like one of Glimmer's people. Or Kenshin. Or - in a sideways kind of way - Benkai. A child of experiments made millennia ago, that mingled human and animal and who knows what else in experiments meant to-

To _what?_ That was the kicker. What were the Ancients trying to do, that went so wrong it created people that have hated them ever since?

"What the heck were they up to?" Sam muttered, fingers clamped on her own notes like she'd like to shred something. "Daniel, did any of the Cerberans' stories have even a hint?"

"We haven't talked to them nearly enough to hear the good stories, yet," Daniel shrugged. "Whatever it was, I'd say it goofed."

"Yeah?" Jack stuck in. "We know that for sure? Call me paranoid, General, but the Ancients had tech that makes us green with envy. And maybe I'm no biologist, but even I know that for all these changelings to still be this much alive and kicking, there'd have to have been an _awful_ lot of escapes." His arched eyebrow said how likely he thought _that_ was.

"That's true, Colonel," I put my two cents in. "But then again, we've seen the Asgaard come up with some pretty odd blind spots as well." Replicator. Explosion. No more Replicator. Simple idea. So simple, an Asgaard couldn't think of it. It took a human's when-all-else-fails-throw-_rocks_-at-the-damn-thing attitude to try it. "We may speculate that you have some Ancient DNA, enough to trigger their devices, but that does _not_ make you an Ancient. For all we know their mindset could have been as alien as the Goa'uld, or the Nox."

"Meaning the idea of Cerberus' altruistic sacrifice on behalf of another person may have just been too alien to anticipate," Daniel nodded. "Humans help each other, Jack. It's hardwired into us. Not many species can say that."

"The Asgaard-"

"We don't really _know_ why the Asgaard do what they do," Daniel said carefully. "They're our allies, Jack, but I can count on both hands the number of days we've interacted with them, face to face. It's not enough time for me to make a good guess why a _human_ culture we've never met before might do what it does." He raised a halting hand. "Yes, I know they've studied us for centuries. What we ran into on Cimmeria shows they still didn't anticipate that humans might someday have a reason to take a Jaffa as an ally - and that's human altruism, Jack."

"I thought it was enlightened self-interest," the colonel quipped back.

Daniel's eyes lit in a shy smile. "That, too."

"We'll consider the Asgaard question at a later date, people," Hammond said frankly. "For now, I have NORAD to deal with. The Joint Chiefs can order them quiet all they like, but the fact remains that we have some serious fence mending to do with our upstairs neighbors. You'd say the Cerberus situation is under control?"

A round of nods.

"And we have ample evidence that Himura and his associates, for their own reasons, aren't talking," the general reflected. "Which leaves us one loose end." He raised a fading red brow at the table in general. "Just who is Hannibal King?"

"Actually, Sir, I've been running a search on him for some time," Sam said briskly, tapping away on her laptop. "I, ah, sort of invited him to have coffee a while back, and I wanted to be sure that was a good idea, so…."

"Major?" Jack prompted, eyes narrowed.

Staring at her monitor, Sam swallowed dryly. "Um, General? We may have a problem…."

---------------

_Hannibal_

Okay, I smell a trap.

Actually, what I smell through the steaming coffee in my grip is a lot of gun oil, military-issue deodorant, and pure human fear, scattered around the coffee-shop inside the bookstore Sam invited me to tonight. And something else.

Something _not_ human.

I feel the last shreds of twilight slip into true night, grab hold of the vampire and push it back, _hard-_

But I can't. Not all the way. Night is here. My time - is here.

Slow breaths, King. _Try_ Megumi's advice; don't fight so much, just try and keep a rein on the worst of it….

My senses spin open wide, sound and smell and brightness scraping at me like a lover's nails over my skin. It hurts, and I want it so bad - and if that doesn't say how truly screwed I am in the head, I don't know what does.

And that alien tang of scent clicks in my head, suddenly, and I realize just a little of it was around Sam the first night we met, like a ghost of exotic perfume. I'd smelled it again that dragon-wrecked afternoon, a little stronger, but between running into Himura again, Glimmer, and talking my way out of trouble with O'Neill, I hadn't had time to pay attention. So what is it, and where is it?

_What_ it is, I don't know. Where, though - based on how the air's moving through this place, most of it's coming from Big, Dark, and Silent in the knit cap, who Sam called Murray on the mountainside. And some more is coming from an older, balding pepper-haired guy who looks enough like Sam to be her father.

Uh-oh.

And… they're matched up with the other undercover military guys kind of scattered through the few other patrons in a loose semi-circle around Sam in the corner, just itching to unload heavy bits of lead in her general vicinity.

_She's_ wearing an armor vest under her nice jacket. Good for her.

I don't smell any teak or ironwood in the area, though. So I doubt anybody got creative with his ammo. Meaning I'm probably the safest person in the room.

What the hell.

I stalked through the tables to Sam, stopped and gave her the nod. "This seat taken?"

"Hannibal…." She swallowed dryly, picked a laptop off the seat beside her, opened it and turned the monitor to face me.

I sat down, hard. _Damn._ How did… _why_ did…?

Didn't matter. There in scanned-in microfiche were the records of one former Sergeant Hannibal King, Marine MP, Pacific campaign, temporary reassignment to code talker work - when did they declassify _that?_ - honorable discharge, PI license, death….

Hoo, boy.

Vampirism's different in this universe. Generally speaking, the vampire has to intend to make a new "childe"; he can't just drain and walk away, like Frost did me, and have one of the corpses break out of the morgue later. If this universe's Deacon Frost got my alternate self - and from the records I found while I was making myself a new ID, _something_ sure did - _that_ Hannibal wouldn't have gotten up again.

Think. Think. Sam's buds are one itchy trigger finger away from filling me full of holes, and I hate to find new trenchcoats-

I swallowed. "You're an astrophysicist, right?"

Blue eyes full of hurt, Sam nodded.

"You ever hear about… alternate dimensions? Flip a coin, and in this universe it winds up heads, an' in some other it's tails, an' in others farther away you miss catching it, an' it rolls off and gets stuck under the sofa, and the minute you spend digging it out means you miss getting hit by a train?"

Sam stared at me. I could feel she wasn't the only one.

"'Bout a year ago, I fell through a hole into San Francisco. _This_ universe's San Francisco. Didn't know that at the time, thought I'd just gotten spell-tossed cross-country. Sorcerers have a bad habit of doing that - hell, I wound up in the Arctic Circle, once - so when things seemed a little off, I just tried to phone home. Only _home_ wasn't there." I turned my cup around in a slow circle on the table. "No Borderline Investigations. No Jessica Drew, ex-Spiderwoman, crawling walls around San Fran to snoop on bad guys. No Dr. Strange makin' mojo in Greenwich Village. No Avengers Mansion, even - an' I did call, even if the only people who'd remember me would be Captain Marvel, the Scarlet Witch, and the butler. Some of my old contacts on the occult scene were still active in Boston, but they swore up, down, and sideways that they didn't remember me. An' believe me, they _would_." I shook my head. "By then I'd figured out that my credit cards weren't valid, my checks ditto, and my driver's license was one quick cop away from landing me in a holding cell - hell, as far as this world was concerned, I didn't exist."

Sam blinked. Kept staring.

"But like I said. I _have_ been tossed weird places before. So I was carrying… negotiables on me. You know? An' I know how to find the shady side of things. So. I found some people, and set myself up a valid ID - yeah, Hannibal _is_ my real name, don't ask me why somebody back in WWII's got it - and went back to work, hoping to keep things together 'til Strange or _somebody_ would come looking for me." I stared into my coffee. "Only nobody has. By this time, I figure nobody will." I let out a slow breath. "PI's hard enough life. Always getting mixed up with demons and sorcerers and Things that want to conquer the world… most of the friends I had ended up like Doug, sooner or later. If Blade's still killing vampires he's probably just as glad not to see me - I got this inconvenient thing called a _conscience,_ y'see - and if Frank Drake's still in one piece, I hope like hell he's back with Marlene an' tryin' to raise kids in the sunshine."

"You hunted vampires," Sam said, stunned. "But you said somebody thought you _were_-"

"Occupational hazard," I said dryly, picking up my cup. "Sleep all day, chase things all night - and if you're a psycho stalking long-distance with night-vision goggles, kind of hard to tell which fighter just turned into mist."

_"Gnrk."_

"Which is why people like Glimmer an' Himura just don't faze me," I shrugged. "Been there, done that, put the stake in it. That enough for your buddies with the heavy artillery? 'Cause if it ain't, can we at least take this outside? I may have sidestepped more than one werewolf with my name tattooed on its arm, but most people don't know enough to hit the ground when the guns go off."

"No one's going to be shooting-" Sam rubbed her eyebrows with her fingertips, obviously trying to hit reset on her view of the world. "I'm sorry… I just have a hard time believing a guy I met used to chase things out of Dracula movies."

I stopped mid-sip, managed not to choke on it. "Yeah. They make movies out of it here, don't they."

"…You're not telling me there really _is_ a Dracula."

"In this world? I don't know," I said frankly. "Where I came from? _Oh_ yeah. Reason Frank got into things that go bump in the night? _Drake_ was an Anglicized version of _Dracula._ Poor guy was the bloodsucker's last known human descendant. Drac used that against him, killed off the first lady he planned to marry, Rachel Van Helsing-"

_"Van Helsing?"_

"Ah… yeah," I said warily. "Let me guess. Fiction here?" The wide blink told me yes. "Well. Anyway. Dracula held title as King of Vampires for over five centuries; could've held it longer, but he got power-greedy and decided to go after a demon-haunted spellbook." Called the Darkhold, but _that_ falls under Need to Know. Maybe I trust Sam, but I don't know just what her branch of the military's mixed up in besides dragons, and just in case the Darkhold really _does_ exist here, I don't want anybody getting ideas. "Nasty thing; sucked the soul right out of anybody normal that touched it. Drac could've used it to conquer the world, only he'd riled up enough people - me, Frank, and Blade bein' a few of 'em - that we were able to track him down and stop him." For a few years, anyway. Which I guess is all the leeway anybody can expect when the mystical gets cranky.

But damnit, for that little while I'd thought I was human. Strange had _told_ me I was human. He was a sorcerer _and_ an M.D. Why shouldn't I have believed him?

'Cause he was the Sorcerer Supreme of Earth, that's why. An' everybody else - me, Blade, Drake, the rest of the "Midnight Sons", just to name a few - were just pawns on his inter-dimensional chessboard, sacrificed for "the greater good" of everybody else.

One word. Just _one_ word to Victoria Montesi, that her dad was really sterile and she wasn't a Montesi at all, and she'd never have picked up a Darkhold spell page. Which would have nipped all kinds of trouble in the bud. Don't know if it would have headed off the whole daughter-of-Cthon mess, but it for damn sure couldn't have hurt. If _my_ biological dad had been the endlessly evil demon-slash-Elder-Power that created the Darkhold in the first place, _I'd_ want to know. If only so I could tell Blade to go ahead and put that stake through my heart, burn what was left to ashes, seal that in concrete, and put the block in the strongest, holiest church he could find.

And Strange didn't tell her.

Sometimes, I could really hate that man.

"But you're not a vampire," Sam said slowly.

"Nope," I agreed.

"Or a sorcerer."

"No way."

"Or a demon."

"Definitely not," I said flatly. "Not a youkai or a hanyou either. And they aren't demons, just so you know. More like… well, fairies. Not the Tinkerbell kind, mind you. The old folktale variety. Daoine Sidhe. Formori. The Cherokee Nunnehi. Powers, that aren't really evil, but are dangerous as a hurricane to tangle with. And for a lot of the same reasons. Somebody like Kenshin, who's got human and youkai in his background - well, he's got to walk a tightrope." And some days, you just slip. Believe me, I know. Outside of Tatjana, none of my slips have been too bad….

And then I think back to one night in a graveyard, and the howl of maddened dogs. God forgive me.

I swallowed hard, and made to get up. "So. Unless you got more questions, I should probably be going. You got plans to make, a world to save…."

"Coffee to drink?" Sam gave me a shy smile.

"Um…" Stall, Hannibal, stall; they're coming up behind you and a _human_ wouldn't hear them. "You believe me?" I didn't have to force that note of disbelief. I've run into heavy-duty supernaturals who wouldn't have bought my story, much less an Air Force Major.

"Let's just say, we have our reasons," a gravelly voice said behind me.

And I did jump. Managed not to twitch toward fangs or claws. Though brother, I wanted to. Ordinary human wouldn't have heard it… but there was something _strange_ about Balding Guy's voice.

Strange voice. Strange scent. Strange feeling, from the vampire instincts wrapped around the PI's; not evil, not good, just creepy. Kind of a _scratch this guy off the menu, it's_ not _worth it._ The hell?

"Well, Sam? Going to introduce us?"

"Dad-"

Dad? Oh, I am in _so_ much trouble-

"-This is Hannibal King, private investigator. Hannibal, this is my father, General Jacob Carter-"

"Retired," Dad stuck in, strangeness almost dropping out of his voice.

"-My CO, Colonel Jack O'Neill-"

Snarky and Annoyed gave me a nod that all but shouted _I_ still _don't trust you, but I'm calling off the air strike. For now._

"-My coworker, Dr. Daniel Jackson-"

The glasses-wearing blond gave me a smile I'd seen on a few Borderline clients; aware there were weird things out there, but willing to believe we were the good guys. Huh.

"-And our friend, Murray."

Knit Cap inclined his head in a sober nod, weighing my every move. I kept my face straight with a definite effort; not only did he carry a stronger stink of whatever was in Jacob, but I could've _sworn_ I heard something squirm and squeal under his shirt, near his gut.

One spell from the Darkhold turned a really bad guy into an immortal - but not unsquishable - walking mass of worms, that fed on human flesh and warmth. Did we have something that nasty going on here?

Keep it together, Hannibal. Sam said they've seen strange things. And Himura's been keeping an eye on these people a while. Any hanyou that much in touch with his demon side would probably know if something else lethal were in town.

Probably.

At least it sounds like there's only one of it, whatever it is. Not that that makes me feel much better. But ripping something out of a guy's gut and stomping on it is a little harsh for a first cup of coffee together. So I restrained myself to a simple "Hi," with an added mental note to keep an ear on them all. If that wriggling thing decided to move house, I wanted to know about it.

"So," Jacob smiled, with just a _little_ bit of warning edge, "just how did you meet my daughter?"

"Had a flat tire," I said truthfully. When in doubt, tell the truth - especially when it'll confuse 'em. "Walked to the nearest place to find a phone, got into an interesting discussion with her an' a few other customers, and ended up finding a place to grab dinner."

O'Neill gave me a _Look,_ then turned a slightly less acid version of it on Sam. "You were in a bar fight? And you didn't invite me?"

"Um…."

"You were _what?_" Jacob all but yelped.

"I'm sure there's a reasonable explanation," Daniel tried to subtly pry Jacob away from our table. No joy.

"You were victorious, Samantha Carter?" Murray rumbled.

A shy smile broke out on her face. "Yeah." Sam gave me a slightly sheepish look. "Ah… I don't think I said I'm sorry I hit you."

"Hey, how could you have known?" I shrugged, absently rubbing my head. Doesn't ache, of course. Just feels like it _should_ ache. The biker idiots are probably still nursing cracked skulls. "I'd've smacked somebody who came up behind me, too."

"You got my daughter involved in a _bar fight?_" Jacob's breathing fire, here.

"_I_ got?" I echoed, stunned. "Hey, she was doing just fine on her own, until they started pulling-" Oops.

"Jacob, just- not here, okay?" O'Neill let Daniel and Murray half-drag Jacob off to another corner, then his face went from friendly to serious. "How bad was it?"

Sam sighed, then launched into a blow-by-blow of that night that would make Sherlock Holmes proud. Whoof. Glad I didn't pull out any tricks besides a little strength, toughness, and speed. And the whammy on the bartender-

Which she mentions, though she calls it just a glare. Eep.

O'Neill gave me a raised eyebrow.

Okay. Time to bluff. "I know what buttons to push on guys like that. Give 'em the eye the right way, 'specially after you've just put ten or so guys on the floor, they'll sell out their own grandmothers. Keys are nothing."

The brow was still up, but he shrugged a little; _okay, I'll buy that. For now._ "Don't try it on Himura."

No friggin' kidding. Not that youkai are any more immune to vampire hypnotism than anybody else. But Kenshin isn't _like_ most people - demon or not. He's got _focus._ Based on that fight of his with Saitou, the kind of focus that looks at mountains in the way and says, _move before I_ make _you move._

Still, pointing any of that out would be a bad idea. "Why not?"

"Oh, a couple of reasons…."

And out come the crime scene photos from an attempted kidnapping. Whoa. Way to trash a perfectly good undercover sedan.

…Wait a minute.

I took the side-view photo from O'Neill, looking past the sword-slices to the make and model. Looked familiar. And not 'cause it was a common type of car around here. The military is not a place to make oodles of money; and while this wasn't an _expensive_ car, it sure as heck wasn't cheap.

The same type of car as-

_That's_ why my nerves were on edge. Damn.

I gave O'Neill a sober look. "Who's your best sneaky guy here?"

"Murray." The colonel didn't raise his voice, but the dark guy headed over to us at a casual glide. "Why?"

I nodded at the photo. "Take a look outside. I got a bad feeling." Actually, what I got is a case of vampire ears, and a pretty good memory for engine sounds. Same thing.

Minute later, Murray's back. "We are under surveillance, O'Neill."

He gave me the raised eyebrow.

I sighed. Looked at Sam. "Guy in a car like this was following you the other night."

Ghost-pale. And believe me, I'd know. "What?" she whispered.

"Didn't want to say anything until I had a chance to figure out what the heck was going on," I admitted. "ID said Harry Thompson. He said he was Homeland Security, and that you were maybe dirty. I figured he was lying through his teeth both times. Cops sure seemed to think so."

"The police? What-" She squinted a little, and I saw her connect the dots at warp speed. "That was your 'little help with inquiries with the cops'?"

"Guilty," I admitted. "They slammed him with trespassing, peeping, illegal parking - every little nuisance thing they could think of. But he's probably made bail by this time. Your local detectives couldn't charge him with anything related to the bug on your transmission without admitting they knew there was a bug there… and they figured that might hurt you more than it helped." I shrugged a little. "Part of why I was hanging around town was to get coffee with you, so I could try and get your side of it. They didn't feel like dirty cops, but I had to be sure."

"My car is _bugged?_"

"GPS locator," I said bluntly. "Didn't see anything else. Didn't have a bug stomper with me, though, so I can't swear that's all."

"But why _me?_" Not quite a wail.

I think I beat O'Neill's raised eyebrow, but not by much. "I may be slow, but I'm guessing - classified?"

O'Neill gave me another _Look,_ this one of the dragon with knight and can opener variety. "You have a case in town, King?"

"Umm…." As a matter of fact, once Takani clued him in on my usual job, Himura had sideways hinted at getting in touch with some organization connected to the lady in the kidnapping case. _Project Wives and Dependents_, I think the name was. And if the guys who'd tried to snatch a little girl really were tied into my little pal from "Homeland Security" - well, I was curious.

And if curiosity led to thumping of bad guys' heads? Hey, that was a bonus.

"Find one."

"Sir," Sam protested.

"Ah!" The colonel gave her a hard look, harder when it fell on me. "Just because we _know_ about alternate universes, guy, doesn't mean we believe that's your story."

"An' you want me to stay put while you check," I said levelly. Know, huh? As in, not just theory? Yow. "Lucky for both of us, the local cops seem to think I'm one of the good guys. They shouldn't hassle me too much about asking to hang up a shingle for a while."

"Asking?" Another look.

Great. Another wise guy who gets his know-how of PI work from late-night TV. "Every state's got different regs on what you need to do to have an investigator's license," I shrugged. "I've chased leads through most of them in my life," and more of them in the near-fifty years of my undeath, but I'm not mentioning that, "so when I got dropped in San Fran and had to start over, I made sure I covered as many licenses as I could, too. Think I've got Colorado. I'm gonna have to check my paperwork t' be sure, though." And make nice with the cops in a major way. Nobody likes getting the impression somebody's trying to muscle in on their job. I never do - they can have the garden-variety muggers and killers and purse-snatchers. With pepper on top. But just saying PI can get the hackles raised on cops who've run into sloppy investigators.

Detectives O'Connell and Cameron were already inclined to be in my corner. A good thing. Still, assuming I had the right to take work here could get me in a world of hurt. Better to make nice first, before I started attracting trouble.

"You do that," O'Neill muttered, then went off to have a serious hissing discussion with Murray. I tried not to listen too hard. If whoever was out there was about to run into payback in a dark alley, I didn't want to be mixed up in it. Yet.

Sam stared into her coffee.

"I like garlic bread."

She blinked. Looked up.

"I have a bad habit of wandering through local cemeteries. I've been known to get into places I don't have keys to, when a case calls for it. And I can limp by in Latin and Ancient Greek." Not to mention a few other tongues that are older, or even downright not human. I have a vested interest in knowing which artifacts have _do not touch - demon prison_ scribed right on them. "Reading, leastwise. Don't ask me to talk it. Japanese I can speak, a little, but don't ask me to read it." We'd never run into Japanese creepy-crawlies while the Nightstalkers were up and running. Thank goodness. If we had, I might've been the only one who could talk to 'em, which would have led Blade and Frank to ask when did I learn Japanese? And if I'd told them… well, that would've blown _I've only been a vampire five years_ right out of the water.

I hated living with that lie. But I'd taken one look at Blade, first time we met, and knew he'd never believe I'd been able to keep from killing for almost half a century. So I fudged. And kept fudging, even when I met Doc Strange. 'Cause good as he seemed, I just… couldn't trust him all the way. He and his pals had been leery enough of tryin' to help me when they thought I'd only been walking the night five years. What would they have done if they'd known I'd literally been a vampire decades longer than I'd been alive? The whole world had changed around me; from Big Band and V-J Day to rock and roll, rap, and a mess in the Middle East that just wouldn't quit. Would they even have believed me if I'd told 'em the names and costumes don't matter - well, they do, it _hurt_ watching the present I knew fade into the past everybody else read about - but people keep living and murdering and covering up the same no matter what year it is?

I don't know for sure, but I can make a guess. So. Zipped lips it was.

"I used to have a cat," Sam offered. "I gave Schrodinger to… a friend. Which was probably a good idea anyway, my work in the lab keeps me away sometimes…."

Ooof. This is one _lonely_ lady. Tight co-workers or not. "I've never had a cat. Too busy moving around on cases, for a while. Then when I was staying put in Boston for a few years, well… the agency took up a lot of my time." I shrugged. "Been re-thinking that. If I end up staying put somewhere."

"Not a dog person?"

Translation, _so you think you might stay put?_

"Nah," I shook my head. "Run up against too many pit bulls, y'know? If I end up sharing my living quarters with something furry, it's got to have the right to tell me to go to hell without either of us getting hurt." Maybe some vampires can mess with cat brains, but I can't. Thank God.

Setting that thought aside, I deliberately cleared my throat. "So… leaving out the parts of your work you can't talk about, which I'm guessing is most of it, how was your day?"

"I've had worse," Sam admits. "Really worse, to be honest; no one got hurt, which makes this a good day… ah, what parts of your work can't you talk about?"

So we're both laying out ground rules, so neither of us gets surprised later. I like this lady. "Sources, mostly. An' client confidentiality. And sometimes - just sometimes, mind you - if I run into something really sticky supernatural-wise, I don't like to spread all the details out. Somebody who knows just a little on demon-summoning is scarier than a kid with a gun, y'know?"

"No, not yet," Sam muttered. There was still that dazed sound in her voice, but her eyes had bounced back. One tough cookie. "Just what did you do to Warner, anyway?"

"You know Doc Warner?" Now, why am I not surprised? "Glared at him."

She snickered.

"He going to lay off Dr. Takani?"

"Yes… why were _you_ seeing her?"

I raised an eyebrow, jabbed a thumb at my chest. "Hello? Spell-tossed? Alternate dimension? I been puttin' it off and puttin' it off, but I hit the ground hard in San Fran and after that mess with Tatjana… well, I figured anybody who looks after a guy like Himura would know if I'm a real mess."

"And?" she pressed.

I rolled my eyes. "Would you believe, low iron?"

Sam burst into laughter.

I think this could be the best cup of coffee I've ever had.

_End._

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Translations and info:

_Kami-sama_ - "Lord god".


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